wiped and formatted, yet still asks about old operating system?

[Les Caudle]

I installed win2000 onto a box that previously had XP - but was infested with
worms.

I wiped the box, killing off the partitions and formatted with NTFS.

When I boot up, it asks which operating system I want (showing the old XP as
well as win2000).

How can I 'wipe' a hard drive so that it really gets wiped?

Could a virus/worm be in the boot sector and survive a new install of Win2000
(as I'm curious how win2000 'knows' about the previous XP at all)?

 

[Rick]

I installed win2000 onto a box that previously had XP - but was infested with
worms.

I wiped the box, killing off the partitions and formatted with NTFS.

When I boot up, it asks which operating system I want (showing the old XP as
well as win2000).

How can I 'wipe' a hard drive so that it really gets wiped?

Could a virus/worm be in the boot sector and survive a new install of Win2000
(as I'm curious how win2000 'knows' about the previous XP at all)?

Is there more than one physical drive in the system? If so,
the system partition is likely there.

If not, you can use any one of many wipe utilities that will
write zeros to the first xxx number of sectors on the drive.
This WILL remove anything and everything, including
partition tables, worms, viruses etc.

If you can't find a decent wipe utility, simply boot off a DOS
diskette with DEBUG on it, and type in the following routine.
The '0080' shown is the first physical drive in the system; if
you have multiple drives you can repeat the process to wipe
them also. Just replace the 0080 with '0081' for the second
drive, '0082' for the third etc.

A:\>DEBUG

- f 200 L200 0

- a 100

xxxx:0100 mov ax,301 (ignore segment ffset values at left)

xxxx:0103 mov bx,200

xxxx:0106 mov cx,1

xxxx:0109 mov dx,0080

xxxx:010C int 13

xxxx:010E int 3

xxxx:010F (Press ENTER an extra time here. (Press it twice.))

- d 100 LF

xxxx:0100 B8 01 03 BB 00 02 B9 01-00 BA 80 00 CD 13 CC

(make sure that hex values match above line before proceeding)

(if values do not match, type Q and start over)

- g=100

(ignore register display)

- q (quits back to DOS)


Rick

 

[ByTor]

I installed win2000 onto a box that previously had XP - but was infested with
worms.

I wiped the box, killing off the partitions and formatted with NTFS.

When I boot up, it asks which operating system I want (showing the old XP as
well as win2000).

How can I 'wipe' a hard drive so that it really gets wiped?

Could a virus/worm be in the boot sector and survive a new install of Win2000
(as I'm curious how win2000 'knows' about the previous XP at all)?

I believe a simple fdisk /mbr command should do it....It appears the
old MBR (master boot record) is still present.

Boot to the recovery console using your win2k cd and at a command prompt
type the command fdisk /mbr.....This will re-write it and should get
rid of it..

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I installed win2000 onto a box that previously had XP - but was infested with
worms.

I wiped the box, killing off the partitions and formatted with NTFS.

When I boot up, it asks which operating system I want (showing the old XP as
well as win2000).

How can I 'wipe' a hard drive so that it really gets wiped?

Could a virus/worm be in the boot sector and survive a new install of Win2000
(as I'm curious how win2000 'knows' about the previous XP at all)?

1. Boot the machine with a Win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com.
2. Run this command: fdisk /mbr

If you previously repartitioned your disk then this command will remove
the last traces of whatever was there. If Win2000 is already installed
then the command will not affect the Win2000 boot behaviour.

 

[Jerold Schulman]

I installed win2000 onto a box that previously had XP - but was infested with
worms.

I wiped the box, killing off the partitions and formatted with NTFS.

When I boot up, it asks which operating system I want (showing the old XP as
well as win2000).

How can I 'wipe' a hard drive so that it really gets wiped?

Could a virus/worm be in the boot sector and survive a new install of Win2000
(as I'm curious how win2000 'knows' about the previous XP at all)?

During the install, Windows caches the operating system settings in C:\boot.ini, so it
can restore them.

Your dirve is really wiped if you formated it.

To remove the Windows XP entry:
1. Open a CMD.EXE window.
2. Type the following commands, pressing Enter after each line:
attrib -r --s -h c:\boot.ini
notepad c:\boot.ini
3. Remove the Windows XP entry and save the file. Exit Notepad.
4. attrib +r +s +h c:\boot.ini
5. Exit.


Jerold Schulman
Windows: General MVP
JSI, Inc.
http://www.jsiinc.com