cleaning computer 100%

E

eddie500

Gawd
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Jan 23, 2003
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IF you wanted to clean your computer 100% of all viruses, including boot sector, bios virues or any type of viruses that could hide someplace, what would be the best method?

I'm assuming it would be the removing the hard drive, flashing a new bios, and then doing a low-level formatting of the hard drive. Does anyone have any better method or tips?

Thanks
 
just remove the partitions and reinstall with fresh partitions.
 
Just format the drive and reinstall windows. No need to flash the bios..
 
bios viruses dont clear, so yeah flashing it is a good idea.. but while flashing remove the stored data..
 
Easykill1978 said:
bios viruses dont clear, so yeah flashing it is a good idea.. but while flashing remove the stored data..
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good god you know of virus's that can write to c-mos? thats terrifying.

no way, I mean, a bios flash in windows (which I would assume its how its done because even an MBR rootkit cant get run on post) is trickey enough, this virus would have to be custom tailored to your motherboard, and theres just not enough commonality of motherboards to make this feasible...

is there?

but yeah, a good reformat will get it all... or so I thought...

Dude I thought that teriforming javascript recent IBM X-force found script was bad (whats it called, Microsoft patched it a couple weeks back, it was a nasty one, managed to get itself plastered all over your IP stack)... but C-mos stored? jeebz

I'ma go hide in Gene Hackman's jar now.

on sorta a side note: one thing about hard drives is that the re-writes of 1s to 0s or vice versa is relative, meaning once you write a 0 to a space where a 1 was it doesn't completly become 0, it becomes a .1 in effect, as theres still a residual charge. You can zero a drive with derricks boot n' nuke, which will make the drive almost completly zeros, I spose is the NSA REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to see what was on your drive after a boot and nuke that they could drop the platters in a machine which looks for the residual charge and try to piece the data back together (this would take millions of dollars and many many weeks of computation). If you nuke the drive, then write misc data to it, clear it, and do it again, you can minimize the charge even further, but you can never compelely that original residual charge. If the person looking at the drive could figure out how many write cycles back the data he was looking at was, he could THEORETICALLY (with millions of dollars and way to much spare time) still piece your data together. The more your repeat the said theory (or just run spin right, it does effectively the same thing) the further up the asymptote your data gets, but like an asymptote you cant totally get rid of it.

suddenly the NSAs method of destroying hard drives (write 0s five times, smash, and burn) doesn't look so ridiculous.
 
BIOS virus is a thng of the past. I don't think there is any way for this to happen these days.
 
OP: If you're really paranoid, just delete all the partitions, reboot (to clear RAM), and the install the OS. It's exceedingly unlikely you have to worry about a BIOS virus.
 
Wiping the partitions and starting over is the simplest method.

If you enjoy laborious times and have a day to waste, use DBAN. That WILL wipe that drive clean. :)

202276
 
Tytalus said:
Wiping the partitions and starting over is the simplest method.

If you enjoy laborious times and have a day to waste, use DBAN. That WILL wipe that drive clean. :)

202276
Click to expand...
Technically, you only have to run that for a few minutes before any virus that was on there is toast ( nuke the partition table and boot sectors, the rest of the data is as good as gone ).

BTW: There is no way to low level a drive anymore. Or rather, if there is, you shouldn't be doing it.
 
eddie500 said:
I read of viruses surviving a hard drive format. How is this possible?
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Blowing away a partition table and formatting the drive should remove any nasties.. never heard of one wistanding that..


if you want your drive toasted, i use active @ kill disk. it has settings for using DOD stadards etc. not only wipes it with 0's and 1's it wipes it with random hex up to as many passes as you want.. As was mentioned before nothing is truly gone once it hits that platter but 5 passes with random hex will make it damn $$$ to recover and no little nasties will survive that.

http://www.killdisk.com/
 
Just so you know, there are actually ways to get a virus to write to the CMOS. I'm not really sure why you would do this as there are much easier ways to screw with computers.

For instance, a friend of mine a couple years ago developed a way to actually have the RAM destroy itself. The software essentially just forces the hardware to open gates incorrectly which allows current to flow in more than one direction at a time, thus destroying the circuit.

::EDIT::

Forgot to reply to the OP. Ok, easiest way to remove a virus from your system (100% of the time) is to buy a new HDD, although a simple partition delete, write 0's, write random, format, shoudl be sufficient to destroy whatever may be living on the platers.
 
Sieravor said:
Just so you know, there are actually ways to get a virus to write to the CMOS. I'm not really sure why you would do this as there are much easier ways to screw with computers.

For instance, a friend of mine a couple years ago developed a way to actually have the RAM destroy itself. The software essentially just forces the hardware to open gates incorrectly which allows current to flow in more than one direction at a time, thus destroying the circuit.
Click to expand...

I am sure it is possible but could you write it to work on random PC hardware that you did not know the specs or OEM on?
 
Eh, that's where the retardedly complex part comes in. I'm not going to go into details about how to do this (I think there are rules about disclosing such things) but it is rediculously complex, requires multiple steps, and by the time you got it to work you would have already built the framework for a system wide hijacking anyway.
 
Sieravor said:
Eh, that's where the retardedly complex part comes in. I'm not going to go into details about how to do this (I think there are rules about disclosing such things) but it is rediculously complex, requires multiple steps, and by the time you got it to work you would have already built the framework for a system wide hijacking anyway.
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I did not expect you to post the exact info but man i would think that would be just stupid hard to accomplish... but i have learned that anything is possible with enough time and resources.
 
the CIH virus years ago was a virus that hosed the bios on some types as well as boot sector. I don't know if such a virus would be viable nowadays, but there once was.

I'm guess by what they mean of a low-level format would be writing 1's or 0's to every sector on the drive. That is still possible by hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic/utilities that you must boot into seperate from the OS. I remember a long time ago, a low-level was done only by the factory, but that was before my 4.6GB Maxtor was the shiznit.
 
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