New
#21
Thanks Theog - I'll have a look.
Meanwhile on my own freshly installed Windows7 computer after I copied my data back on and used the PC for about 1 day, MalwareByte's Anti-Malware has discovered something called:
"Hijack.DisplayProperties"
located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
(Malwarebytes.org)
This sounds quite serious, no?
I can't THINK how it got there because this time round I have been extremely careful. Do you think my data could be infected??
Ship
No.
Googling says it is a policy setting and can be ignored as if it were a false positive. Let MBAM either fix it or ignore it.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/i...1&#entry121291
Google the error for additional opinions if necessary.
i see what you mean, but im (90%) sure that a delete all partitions and windows format will not leave you vulnerable, you are right in that all your files are still there, just invisible, but if windows cant see them, windows cant use them
wait..
shiphen, When you did reinstall your Windows you did custom install right?
And you did format it with Windows Install disk and recreate all partitions? (that very quick format)
If you did this, you don't have Windows old folder. So don't worry about it.
Jav, I'm not precisely sure what you mean by a "custom install" but yes I booted of the DVD and I found a screen that said "Where would you like to install Windows7?" (or something similar) and on that screen I tried everthing: I asked it to format the partitions and nothing much seemed to happen. I deleted all partitions and recreated them again. At one point when I asked it to format a partition it paused for about 4 or 5 seconds - but clearly not long enough to do any kind of serious formatting!
What still slightly worries me is that at the time of re-creating partitions, Windows7 grabbed about 100GB for its system files (or something). Sure enough my hard disk (a 500GB Seagate - model: ST3500320NS) now says that the C: drive's capacity is only 465GB rather than 500GB. And I was slighty suspicious that Windows7 might have been lazy and that the hidden partition might not have been formatted/rebuilt.
It is probably just me being paranoid... but there again if I was a virus author (which for the record I certainly am not!) then I would certainly be exploiting any such weaknesses of Windows7.
4-5 seconds is enough time to format. It's called quick format.
It's probably being reported as 465GB because Windows uses powers of 2 to report drive space, while drive manufacturers use powers of 10.
If that confuses you , wikipedia Gigabyte or Megabyte. There will be something about drive space.
i said 90% because if on the off chance i was wrong, and the OP had picked up a very ingenious virus, i didnt want to leave myself open to blame, what i was trying to impart was that it is highly unlikely a virus would remanifest itself, but how do you know what the next big malware attacks going to be?
By my own powers of deductive reasoning, if a program cannot exist without executable code, then a virus cannot exist without executable code....