wrote zero's to drive, still acts like it has a virus

[reincarnage]

i have fixed a lot of computers, in 7 years.. the only thing i havent tried is flashing the bios or different ram.. its very slow with bursts of normal speed. the customer had infected it with god knows how many virii.. i wrote zero's to the drive and did a fresh install of xp and it still acts like something is wrong.. any ideas would be appreciated..

[Frozen8950]

Mabye the problem isnt a virus on the drive.
True there were virii before and maybe there was another problem that you thought was caused by virii.
Got rid of the virii and problem is still there.

What exactly is the computer doing? Was the install of XP very slow?
have you tried running a diagnostic on the drive?

[thedude42]

i have a pre emptive suggestion (not to steal your thunder, frozen)

might try to see if the drive manufacturer has a floppy utility for download that has specific diagnostics on it. i've had good luck with that in the past, and the experience landed me with an RMAed new drive.

[r00k]

does this drive perform the same way in any computer / configuration? i mean with low level zero's having been written to it,thats considered military grade wiping. i just don't get the feeling that its a virus, so much as just a failing hard drive. the symptoms are similar to many that i have worked on / rma'd thru the years

[reincarnage]

i did the quick disk check and the extended disk check with the western digital floppy and it came up with zero errors. i was leaning toward the hard drive failing, i suppose ill swap hard drives and see whats up tomorrow.. (after all its new years eve).. xp install wasnt especially slow, the boot time isnt really too bad either.

[nessus]

does this drive perform the same way in any computer / configuration? i mean with low level zero's having been written to it,thats considered military grade wiping. i just don't get the feeling that its a virus, so much as just a failing hard drive. the symptoms are similar to many that i have worked on / rma'd thru the years

For sensitive materials, secure wiping requires 49 consecutive rewrites with random data. Writing all 0's once is easy to recover with off-the-shelf software available to consumers for use without even removing the drive from a computer.

You should actually be safe after the 30th rewrite of random data even with the recovery equipment available to the richer countries such as the US, but the extra rewrites are required to be sure.

[reincarnage]

well i threw another h.d. in there and it was fine.. so i threw the problem one in there as a slave and access times were just fine to the problem drive.. so i formatted again with partition magic and reinstalled xp and everything was fine.. effed up i tell ya.. thanks for all the suggestions adn waht not..

[Novensu]

I have been able in most cases to fix this by using the FDISK/MBR command. It will reset the master boot record, which some viruses modify.


Novensu

[reincarnage]

I have been able in most cases to fix this by using the FDISK/MBR command. It will reset the master boot record, which some viruses modify.


Novensu
i did that before writing zero's to the drive which is supposed to be even more drastic.. im just happy i fixed it, the only thing i see that i did different is i used fat32 on the newest format, and created a partition on the drive.. so i basically did the stupid thing of trying to many ideas at once.. not sure what fixed it besides me trying different solutions..

[eeyrjmr]

All multiple passes of a shredding program does is makes it harder for some-one IF they get hold of your harddrive to recover your data.

One pass is more than enough to nuke any viruses from comming back - last time I checked (and it is quite freqent) viruses cannot re-assemble themselves by low-level sector scanning - they cant even be executed