Cleaning up a malwared drive for use.

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winddelay · #1 Post by **winddelay** » Mon Jul 30, 2007 2:42 am

I've got a drive that I'd like to add to my system, but it's chock full of malware and viruses, and I was not sure how to clear it safely. A friend suggested I try UBCD, so I downloaded and burned the iso, set my bios to boot from it, and got the drive ready to swap in, but I'm not sure which tool I should proceed with. I want to clear all data from the drive, but still have it usable. My main worry is not clearing it properly, and having virus' remain on the drive, or worse, rendering the drive useless.

My OS is XP sp2, and the drive in question is a western digital 20gb model# wd200eb-00csf0 with a production date of oct 2001. I have some reference material for the actual setting up the drive in xp, but I'd appreciate any advice on making sure it's formated properly so that xp can partition it.

Also, I have a seagate 8.4gb model# st38410a drive I salvaged from my first pc, and i'd like to hook that up as well, as I have not seen any of the things that are on it since that pc died almost 10 years ago. I'll probably salvage anything of value off it, and do a clean sweep on that as well, unless I could just remove the windows 98 installation from it. My main question with that is whether I have to do anything fancy with it to access it's data with xp?

And also any pointers on how I'm supposed to set my jumper settings would be awesome. I have the malwared drive in the master position for the swap in, but I imagine after it's cleared, I have to switch it over to slave, and my main over to master with slaves... the seagate 8.4gb is already switched over to slave.

I'd appreciate any pointers, and I apologize for asking so much... I've lost some of my tech savvy over the years. I know this is a lot of trouble to go through for just 28.4 extra gigs, but I just can't afford the 500gb external drive I have my eye on, let alone the terabyte drives that are coming out nowadays.

#2 Post by **Victor Chew** » Mon Jul 30, 2007 6:02 am

You can simply boot up your WinXP CD, delete all the partitions you can find on that HDD, create a partition that spans your entire HDD, then install WinXP on it.

Unless I am not getting something, the WinXP install CD already has everything you need!