Of the external USB HD or the laptop's HD?
(If the latter, like I said, I had already started running autonuke after Borg's initial reply. I had done some googling after my reply and answered my own question, so I thought it was what I needed to do.I ran it before the format, though, and can remember a lot of the information, if you did indeed need that and not the external drive. )
The Disk Management shows all of the hard drives on the PC including partitions.
If you already went ahead and started the format of the Laptop's hard drive . Nothing is needed now until we are done with the installation and we do some scans.
My recommendation would be leave the formatting for the last option .
Okay, thank you. (I thought I might have messed up for a second.) I'll let you know when the wipe's done and I've reinstalled the OS.
The wipe will take a while. Its going through every sector on the drive. Installation from a DVD clean install should take no more then 25-45 mins depending on the hardware. Installation from a USB flash drive 15-25 mins .
Windows disk management, in many cases, won't show you the hidden Alureon boot partition since it cloaks itself.
To see it, you need a boot partition manager like GParted. It will show up as a hidden partition at the end of the drive, usually 1 - 10 MB in size depending on the variant. Wiping the entire drive erases it.
If, after wiping the drive & doing a clean install you find Alureon again, one of your backup files is very likely infected.
sharona,
Alureon is not a good thing. Just let us know when you are done with the clean install, and we will take it from there.Borg 386: If, after wiping the drive & doing a clean install you find Alureon again, one of your backup files is very likely infected.
VistaKing, DBAN is still running. It says it's got about 3.5 hours still left. I have work tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll be up late enough to get a reinstall done tonight.
However, I'm currently running scans on my external hd. It looks like something might be there, not sure what yet, though. I went ahead and bought some blank CDs so I can put a copy of the WiFi driver on one instead of using the usb device to be on the safe side.
Currently using MalwareBytes to scan it. Scan's still running, been running for about 1.5 hours. It says it's detected 2 objects so far. Not sure how much longer til it's through. I was going to run MSE overnight as it's going to take several hours.
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