Unable to format hard drive

[garym]

I have a trojan malware virus in my computer. It hi-jacks my home page and takes me where I do not want to go on the net. I have also lost my control panel function and can not do things such as set up short cuts. It tells me that I need administration rights to do this. I have run spyware doctor several times and it detects the virus but when I click to remove it my laptop reboots and the virus is still there. Norton does not detect it. So I have decided to format my hard drive but I am unable to do this. I have tried two ways: I have clicked on my computer, selected the c drive, selected file/format. I get a message saying windows is unable to complete format. I then brought up the command prompt and tried to format through DOS. I get a message saying that "format can not run because volume is in use by another process". I'm at wits ends here. How can I get past this virus to format my hard drive????

Gary

 

[howard_hopkinso]

You need to do the following.

Diconnect from the net and don`t reconnect, until you have your firewall software installed.

1 Restart your computer and go to setup usually by pressing the F2 or delete key.

2 Once you get into setup look for the boot menu and make sure you set it to boot from cd first followed by your hard drive.

3 Put the Windows xp disk into your cd drive.

4 Now save your settings and exit setup.

5 While your computer is booting you will see a message that says "press any key to boot from cd" press any key.

6 When the welcome to setup screen appears press enter and then press F8 to accept the Microsoft licence agreement.

7 You will be prompted to repair an installation press the escape key.

8 Now select the partition that you want to reformat and press the D key to delete it you will be asked to confirm that you want to delete the partition.

9 Now press C to create a brand new partition you will be asked what size you want the partition to be in mega bytes. If you just press enter then the partition will be the maximum size that you can have. This is perfectly ok if you don`t want to create multiple partitions.

10 You will now be asked to format the partition select the ntfs file sytem and do a full format.

11 Once the format is complete setup will continue.

Your computer will restart during the remaining setup again you will be asked to press any key to boot from cd DO NOT PRESS ANYTHING and setup will continue. Once the setup is complete and you are back in Windows remove the Windows cd from your cd drive.

Install your firewall software and reconnect to the net. Install whatever drivers you need, then run Windows updates.

Finally, install whatever programmes/software you want.

Regards Howard

 

[garym]

Thanks for the reply. I did as you suggested. I have a HP Compaq NX5000. I need to press F10 to enter setup. It gives me two bootup order options: multibay and HDD. I selected multibay first thinking this would be for the CD bootup option and I used the CD recovery disk that came with this. It didn't ask me any questions about formatting and continued to boot up normally. What do I do next????

Gary

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Take a look HERE and HERE.

Regards Howard