One of my older computers is still running Windows 2000 Professional. It has not been reformatted for many a year. I doubt it has even been defragged for many, many moons. I've basically been using it as a "meat shield." Any time I wanted to download an application that looked kind of shady, I did a test run on this thing. It was actually a decent strategy with no risk to my more critical systems. For those many years though, it had literally no antivirus, Mcafee, or any other form of protection. This thing has more spyware/adware/malware than you could shake a stick at. I tried downloading some of the free trial software for spyware removal, and some of them certainly exacerbated the problem. Since it is now too bogged down to use my Mozilla, the current setup has outlived its usefulness to me.
I'm sure you get this sort of problem all the time, but my efforts to reformat the c drive have fallen short. After entering the "format c:" I get the standard "WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST! Proceed with Format (Y/N)?" Well, I am actually hoping to lose all this virus ridden software. I didn't even bother backing anything up, because I have absolutely nothing useful on that hard drive and there is no way I will risk re-contamination. After pressing "y", I get "Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N)
Well, I don't see any other applications open on the task bar or when I check the Task Manager, and this computer isn't networked to anything (by design). I know the hard drive is partitioned, but I don't know if this has any bearing. So, I plow ahead and press "y". I see "Cannot lock the drive. The volume is still in use."
I would like to take this computer with me to school on Wednesday, August 22, so I would like to have my bootleg copy of Windows reinstalled before then. If not, well, I'll just ransack a hard drive from a different unit and worry about fixing this one later. Suggestions?