I searched the archives, but couldnt find this one. I have a 40gb Western Digital and 80gb IBM drives, that i suspect may have viruses in the boot sectors. When i do just like FDISK, it removes the partitions, but leaves certain files intact (like boot.ini and others) If there are viruses in these sectors, they will not be eliminated. How can i scrub ALL the sectors on my two drives and make NTFS partitions from the clean drives. Any ideas?? ps. also, if i add on an external drive to transfer over the files i wanna keep before i fully wipe my drives, will it get infected also??

if the files you're going to backup is infected, then the drive you're going to transfer it to will get infected too. are you sure you used fdisk and there are still files left behind? i thought fdisk completely wipes the disk clean of files.

FDISK doesnt touch the boot areas, as far as i know, and I was concerned that if i install the hard drive, that the windows OS system files that go on the new drive when the drive is mounted might infect it if they are bad.?? Anyone know?

at a command prompt type in 'fdisk /mbr' (no quotes) that will rebuild the boot sector.

Thanks, Bill I just type it in, do i have to know any other information (like sector size, HDD capacity) to enter in, after the fdisk /mbr, or will it automatically know what the settings are?? I havent done it yet, and just dont wanna be stuck with a dead drive.

The FDISK /mbr command just replaces the "code" on the boot sector with a clean copy. Leaving partition information unchanged. Safe to run/use. But only does this on the C: drive. There are additional parameters that will do the same on additional drives.