A lot of trouble with Windows 7

Hello msy199623, welcome to Seven Forums!


The only true way to get completely rid of most viruses is to completely wipe the entire HDD and do a clean install, have a look at the information below and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.


After you have copied out or made back-ups of the data you need to save to external media, use Step One of this tutorial at the link below to do a wipe (secure erase) to the entire Hard Disk Drive / Solid State Drive.

• Then if you do not want to create the new Windows 7 "System Reserved" partition use the outline in Step Two #2 to create, format and mark Active a single 100GB partition to do the installation to.
• If you do want to create the "System Reserved" partition use the outline in Step Two #3 to create, format and mark Active the System Reserved partition and then create and format the 100GB partition to do the installation to.

Either way, running the "clean all" then creating and formatting the partition(s) using diskpart will get you the best possible space to do a clean install of Windows 7 to; you can always extend the Windows partition to include the remaining unallocated space on the HDD / SSD or create additional partitions after the installation completes if you choose.

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

DISKPART : At PC Startup

Do a Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version

Have a look at Option Three of this tutorial to do a partition-specific wipe to the Windows 7 partition, it may help or it may not but it's worth a try; of course you will have to back-up the data on the Windows partition first.

Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

No matter what you do, if you do a clean install you will have to reinstall all the programs/apps that you use, they integrate themselves into the Windows registry and are not moveable from one Windows installation to another so be sure to save the program activation keys where applicable.

Have a look at this one.

USB Windows 7 Installation Key Drive - Create

MacGyvr said:

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello msy199623, welcome to Seven Forums!


The only true way to get completely rid of most viruses is to completely wipe the entire HDD and do a clean install,

Without any doubt, the most insane piece of advice I've read since my first visit to this board, and I don't even care if my saying so gets me kicked off. I make my living removing viruses from computers, several per week, and have NEVER had to wipe a machine to get rid of one. This user screwed himself over by "upgrading" his Windows on top of an already existing installation. Yes, he needs to wipe and reload, but not because of the virus.

You are completely 100% wrong.

I do not care who you are, what you do, or how long you have been doing it, nor where you come from...;...

Just because you can not prove that a virus still exists or parts of it after an infection has been cleaned, does not in any way, shape or form of fashion in any reality constitute a clean system. Nor can you guarantee 100% that other problems do not exist or will not exist, or manifest in the future, no matter if you ever hear back from them again. Or they say years later that the system is still running fine. That just means that particular system is not symptomatic of having been infected.

You absolutely 100% can say that after wiping the drive and reloading the OS.

However, if the existing data on an external source is still infected, well, not much anyone can do there.

About one of the links posted by BFK above regarding Secure Erase....

I just want to point out that,,,, DBAN, unless something has changed, would not be approved for use by NIST as it does not utilize the Secure Erase feature.

Which is why I recommend completely and only, secure full hard drive sanitation is HDDErase

According to National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-88 [PDF], the only method of software-based data sanitation must be one that utilizes a hard drive's Secure Erase commands.

Also note,,,,

Block overwrite utilities overwrite all user accessible blocks (at the time of overwriting).
It gives a higher level of deletion confidence than file erase, and these utilities claim to
meet Federal Government requirements in DoD 5220. Today’s hard drive technology has
obsoleted this document, and NIST 800-88 should be used instead.