[funnybone]

Hello:

My friend's computer has been hit by a virus so that the only response to turning on the unit is: first a full screen graphic saying Hewlitt Packard--wich stays on-screen for 35 seconds, then flips to Microsoft's Windows ME graphic. ..but nothing ever opens any further.

No keyboard key or any mouse movement have any effect.

It was my intention to format the hard drive from DOS--but the computer never started off with the two screens of white letters on black allowing me to enter Set-up.

I never thought to see if the boot sequence happened to start with A:/ drive, but as i had to change the sequence in mine, I didn't think to try. ..so I never even tried a boot disk.

My computer is running Windows ME [as is the infected Hard drive].

My question is: can I plug his infected hard drive into an ATA 133 PCI Adapter Card on my computer and [A]: run a virus scan on it as a periferal drive? [B]: format it as a periferal drive to my existing Windows ME Operating System--without my computer getting infected as it recognises a new piece of hardware and gets itself all oriented to interface with it? [assuming that I will not boot to that infected drive upon start-up]

Thanks,
Jason

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you should be able to put the infected drive in to your computer without worying about infection (especially if your plan is just to format the drive) any programs on that drive (including viruses) will not execute and you should be fine..

[dsenette]

you should be able to put the infected drive in to your computer without worying about infection (especially if your plan is just to format the drive) any programs on that drive (including viruses) will not execute and you should be fine..

[acklan]

I you are worried you can "wipe" the drive instead of just formatting it. When I do a clean install I use Active@KillDisk-Drive Wipe Utility. The have both a floppy and CD freeware version that will conduct a "Quick wipe". If you are Black Helicopter paranoid you can use Digital Dolly (Hard drive utility) to preform a "Gutman wipe" which will make 38 passes over the data. Even the U.S. Department of Defence considers this overkill (They only over write 7 times). Digital Dolly is also a freeware program but has to be booted from a CD. It has many more useful tools than KillDisk. Should be in everyone's eTool kit.

[funnybone]

Ok. Thank you.

I thought it would be ok. ..but I'm a carpenter, and I didn't want to have to fix it with a hammer.

[acklan]

Been there, got the tee shirt.