After lots of time at my parents house burning various stuff onto CDs using their pc (and 8meg connection) i have my pc back again.

The first thing i did was download XP SP3 so i could burn it to disk. I then spent ages pissing about trying to find out...

1) what the hell an ISO image is,

2) how to burn an ISO image to a CD, but convert it from an ISO into a disk that i could actually use.

then i downloaded Zonealarm, Adaware SE, AVG 8.5, Malwarebyte's anti malware, Spybot S&D and burnt those onto another disk.

I then re-formatted my HDD and attempted to install XP SP3...

It wouldn't work!!! :banghead: It looks like i had missed an option when i burned the ISO to the disk, so it was not made into a bootable disk

So, i re-installed SP1, installed SP3 straight after that, then installed Zonealarm firewall, AVG 8.5, Malwarebytes, spybot S&D and then, and only then, was i prepared to access the internet.

I went straight to windows update and got all the updates i was missing (32 of them, 56mb worth) and now everything appears to be working properly, and this PC is the fastest it has ever been, even after i have made it all vista-like again!

I have also gone through my services.msc and disabled a good 10 or 12 things that i do not need, plus i did the Irq14=4096 trick in sysedit which speeds up the HDD, and i have also adjusted my pagefile size manually for best performance.

I just tried LFS (which i had on the original Z version on CD just in case of things like this happening) and i can now get a nice 78fps with all AA/AF settings at maximum!

Im a happy dude now!

Quote from pb32000 :

Wtf are you on about? Stop giving false advice.

false advise u say...he did say that his hdd was infected did he not ?.....cure for infected hdd NEW HDD dont tell me that im giveing false advise these days thats what u do well i do anyway theres not point in even trying to cure an infected hdd

Would be quite expensive buying a new hard drive every time you got some malware on it, considering it's quite easy to clean it if you know what you're doing.

im not trying to give bad advise or nothing but even if u think uve cleaned up ya hdd u sometimes havent any malware virus or trojans (wooden horse with men inside) have a tendence to rename themselves if played around with or u reinstall os or even a fresh install depending how bad these things are advise given to me was buy a new hdd coz u shouldnt mess with it in the first place....see where im going with this...im only trying to help out with the advise i was given and not to give bad advise.


Supaheli

Quote from Supaheli :

false advise u say...he did say that his hdd was infected did he not ?.....cure for infected hdd NEW HDD dont tell me that im giveing false advise these days thats what u do well i do anyway theres not point in even trying to cure an infected hdd

Reformat... Done.

Anyway, great that you got it sorted Dan These things can be a real pain and I lost count of the number of nights I've stayed up late trying to fix viruses etc. Hopefully you won't have too many more problems

Have you got it working then?

Yeah its going again now thanks jakg, that disk would still be handy though if thats ok, so if it goes wrong again at least i will have a working version of SP3 instead of just the upgrade disk.

Stopped dual booting XP over a year ago, couldn't be happier.

Quote from Supaheli :

false advise u say...he did say that his hdd was infected did he not ?.....cure for infected hdd NEW HDD dont tell me that im giveing false advise these days thats what u do well i do anyway theres not point in even trying to cure an infected hdd

Quote from Supaheli :

im not trying to give bad advise or nothing but even if u think uve cleaned up ya hdd u sometimes havent any malware virus or trojans (wooden horse with men inside) have a tendence to rename themselves if played around with or u reinstall os or even a fresh install depending how bad these things are advise given to me was buy a new hdd coz u shouldnt mess with it in the first place....see where im going with this...im only trying to help out with the advise i was given and not to give bad advise.


Supaheli

You are probably right. As pointed out above it took this guy hours to figure out what an iso image was and how to do this and that and learn about the different way's in which things work in puters. Hours lost in 'catching up' and downtime for the PC would surely equate to the price of a cheap HDD if you value your time at all, but there's no harm in DIY because you never know you just might learn something

@ danthebangerboy - you can install this and it asks you for your Windows CD and any service packs creating a fresh custom XP disc and gives you the option of removing components etc, http://www.nliteos.com/guide/

Or, winbuilder goes into a little more detailfor you http://winbuilder.net/help/#Overview

There are programs that can truly format a disk right? Don't they write over the drive several times to burry info or something, like to the point the CIA would fail to mine it for data?

We throw out/sell old PC's with private data that needs removing. We use http://www.dban.org/ before getting rid of them.


easy-peasy lemon-squeezy

Ubuntu also includes a nifty little "shred" command for deleting single files/folders, that overwrites the old space with blanks. I'm nearly sure that if you booted into a Live CD with Ubuntu, you could use shred on the whole HDD

Quote from DHRammstein :

There are programs that can truly format a disk right? Don't they write over the drive several times to burry info or something, like to the point the CIA would fail to mine it for data?

...I suppose it depends on what you need to hide and how big it is, rarely is it practical for businesses to adopt the method of data disposal in this way with HDD's, backup media is super cheap and those tapes hold colossal TB's and burn in a jiffy

As I understand it with file deletion and viruses in containers .exe .rar .zip etc. I don't think they can sit dormant in a kind of undeleted state until called upon...hence the need to be sure that your format burned the nads offof the HDD to get all them nasty's, na , a reference to the mal file will still exist but it can not interact and load to memory, can it?

...I am an extreemly paranoid person by nature, kinda like lerts on a normal day, anyone here can me tell their OS is secure here? Prove it?(and I don't mean firewall records for the last thirty years, XP professional only - resultant set of policy please