Help with wiping hard drive!

[BanjoDrummer]

My newly built pc has been having many issues and I was thinking about reinstalling windows and wiping the hard drive.

However, I might have some sort of virus or a nasty program that might survive the formatting and clearing of the hard drive.

My questions are:

1. Is there a way I can run some scans to find out how much time I need to spend on wiping the hard drive?

2. How would I completely wipe the hard drive so that I am not taking any risks of any harmful programs staying on the hard drive?

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
You might state which security you had installed,
Also what issues were occurring ?
Newly built could be hardware related ?
See the link above my signature to fill in your system spec's page if you haven't I forgot to check

As far as free scanners go these are about the best I recommend,
Review Jacee’s instructions to run Adwcleaner here post #7,
Ignore the title of the thread,
http://www.sevenforums.com/system-security/316404-instant-savings-app.html
Screen shot of the download button to use for Adwcleaner
You can use these free tools to see if they find anything,
Manually Update them before running full scans,
Try not to use your computer while the scans are running, (one at a time of course).
Uncheck the box to Activate the Free trial from the final install options,
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free
http://www.superantispyware.com/?tag=SUPERANTISPYWARE
This one is the longest up to 4 hours, the others are only about 45 minutes,
http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx

 

[BanjoDrummer]

Hi,
You might state which security you had installed,
Also what issues were occurring ?
Newly built could be hardware related ?
See the link above my signature to fill in your system spec's page if you haven't I forgot to check

As far as free scanners go these are about the best I recommend,
Review Jacee’s instructions to run Adwcleaner here post #7,
Ignore the title of the thread,
http://www.sevenforums.com/system-security/316404-instant-savings-app.html
Screen shot of the download button to use for Adwcleaner
You can use these free tools to see if they find anything,
Manually Update them before running full scans,
Try not to use your computer while the scans are running, (one at a time of course).
Uncheck the box to Activate the Free trial from the final install options,
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free
http://www.superantispyware.com/?tag=SUPERANTISPYWARE
This one is the longest up to 4 hours, the others are only about 45 minutes,
http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx

I am using microsoft security essentials.

As far as I am concerned, I do not think that I have any hardware problems

These are the tests I did:

1. Memtest 86+ (Ran overnight for 13.5 hours for both sticks of RAM and passed 7 times)
It ran good for 7 tests but when I pressed "c" to enter the configuration, I unintentionally changed the test to "1". It gave me the option to choose from 1-11 I think. When I did this, I got errors but I am not sure if that is because I messed up the settings or because my RAM has problems


2. Furmark (Don't think there are any issues with my graphics card)

3. chkdsk (Checked my hdd)


For the issues that are occuring:

1. Constant BSOD - You can see that I have made several different threads on getting bsod and I have gotten many more that I didn't post about. Blue screens occured randomly while gaming, browsing, but mostly gaming.


2. Game crashing - the game will be running perfectly smooth at 60fps and then it freezes a little and then I get the message that the game has crashed or sometimes even bsod.



3. Browsers keep crashing - I have internet explorer, chrome, and firefox. Each one has had issues. For internet explorer, I keep getting the "Explorer has stopped working" message. For chrome, I have gotten the "AW SNAP" and "WHoa! Google chrome has crashed! Relaunch now?". FOr firefox, I just get the message that it crashed.