Does FDisk + Format = pristine HDD?

[BionicJohn]

I had a 400Gb Samsung which was ravaged by the trojans Win32 Vitro and Virut. It infects every *.exe program - Avira found 621 infected files. See, for example,

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=42709.0

As soon as the trojans were detected, the HDD was immediately removed from the (networked) PC. It was then attached to standalone as a second disk (i.e. no exe file loaded) FDisk, where the drive was repartitioned and formatted.

The AV software and Malwarebytes do not detect anything.

Can I be certain that the drive is no longer infected and can be re-used?

Cheers, John.

Liverpool: Capital of Culture 2008
Anfield: Capital of Football since 1892
Iechyd da! John
Glannau Mersi, Lloegr.

 

[BadBigBen]

I would say a Yes with reservations, FDISK kills the structure (partitions) and reassembles them, format just overlays the Dir Structure on that drive...

AV products rely on this DIR Structure and do not dig deeper, if you run a data recovery program on that drive, you would see what I mean, as some if not most of the DATA is still left on the drive...

to be really sure that nothing is left on the drive, I would run DBAN or KillDisk (or similar programs) on that drive, as these will OVERWRITE the drive sector for sector with either 0 or random data (depending on the setting), and then you can be sure that nothing is left on that drive...


Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[BionicJohn]

Thanks confirming my suspicions, Ben.

I'll run DBAN or KillDisk - better to be safe.

Cheers, John.



Liverpool: Capital of Culture 2008
Anfield: Capital of Football since 1892
Iechyd da! John
Glannau Mersi, Lloegr.