How do I *completely* kill all files when re-installing

ignatzatsonic said:

Who made your hard drive?

The drive utilities at the manufacturer's web site nearly always include a method to write zeros to the entire drive, as you might do before disposing of it. I used it recently on a Western Digital drive.

You don't need to burn a disc.

I am guessing these apps will work when you have a one drive system. It may be that you have to connect the drive to another working system, but I doubt it. I've always had an OS drive available.

Pauly is correct about required time.

If the drive is going to the trash anyways just take a sledgehammer to it.

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

shiphen said:

This sounds quite serious, no?

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.

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.