5punk

For future reference, this is what I do with massively epic fucked machines.

This is very much the long way round, but IME it's about as safe as you can get.

1) Backup as much as possible onto usb sticks.
2) Backup again, to a CD/DVD or HDD, if available.
3) Copy the usb sticks onto an up-to-date and secure sacrificial machine (I keep an old box about for these things)
4) Scan/fix the living shit out of the datas.
5) Format the USB sticks
6) Backup the clean datas, ideally onto another secure machine using clean USB sticks.
7) Attempt to clean the sick machine, it's unlikely it'll work, but sometimes it can. (Wouldn't spend more than an hour on this usually)
8) Delete the partitions on the HDD of the old machine, then make new ones. (I prefer to do a full format, rather than a quick format, just to be safe)
9) Install windows, antivirus, antimalware, antiretard, Firefox with adblockplus.
10) Set windows up the best you can - Install video players/codecs etc, just to lessen the risk of them installing something stupid.
11) Consider training your retard into backing stuff up (C&H will probably have good advice for this) and not installing crap.
12) ...
13) Bill Hourly.
14) Profit.

If all else fails, tell them to buy a computer for mommys and daddys

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LLTsSnGWMI[/media]

Berk, being honest here, while I'd not normally recommend a low level, this pc has been open to the full horror of the interwebs, I wouldn't want to chance something nasty lurking around it, low level stuff might not be common but they do exist.

buzz, you do NOT low level format disks any more, it would help more than a high level format and can actually be dangerous to your drive.

Wikipedia wrote:Starting in the early 1990s, low-level formatting of hard drives became more complex as technology improved to:

* switch from FM to MFM to RLL encoding,
* switch from constant angular velocity, recording the same number of sectors in each track (like most floppy disks), to zone bit recording, which stores more sectors on the longer outer tracks.
* switch from track numbers encoded on a separate "servo platter", to encode track numbers into the same disk surface as the data, to simplify hardware, and
* increase the mechanical speeds of the drive.

Rather than face ever-escalating difficulties with BIOS versioning, disk vendors started doing low-level formatting at the factory. Today, an end-user, in most cases, should never perform a low-level formatting of an IDE or ATA hard drive, and in fact it is often not possible to do so on modern hard drives outside of the factory.[1][2]

The primary reason low-level formatting cannot be done is because modern drives do not use stepper motors to locate tracks, and hence there is no way to determine where tracks should be recreated on the media. Instead in modern drives the heads are positioned using a stepless analog servomotor, often referred to as the voice coil since it operates almost exactly like an analog audio speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_forma ... y_from_LLF

Berks long way around the houses is safest if you are not sure it's clean/want to be sure.

buzzmong wrote:Berk, being honest here, while I'd not normally recommend a low level, this pc has been open to the full horror of the interwebs, I wouldn't want to chance something nasty lurking around it, low level stuff might not be common but they do exist.

you still can't low level format a disk. silly boy.

cheeseandham wrote:Berks long way around the houses is safest if you are not sure it's clean/want to be sure.

My way is massively overkill, but it pretty much ensures no AIDS for any computers involved. it's possible to skip a few steps (like the windows nuke) on less infected machines

Pfft to the both of you.

Solution #2:

Drop it in acid and buy a new disk.

Yeahhhh, drastic and perhaps the final solution.

/may be going for the silly as he's wrong.

5punk

Trying to help a friend