Virus-Infested Hard Drive Swap

[EXCellR8]

So I've been trying to fix my sisters laptop for a few days now and it's not going so well. Basically, she didn't have any anti-virus installed so now the drive is infested with all sorts of nasty stuff and windows almost doesn't even work. To make things even better, the stupid thing has no CD-ROM drive so I can't even use the recovery disk it came with! It's a little MSI wind notebook with windows xp home sp3 installed.

I tried reinstalling the OS from a bootable USB flash drive (4gb) but that went horribly. I couldn't delete the original partition for whatever reason and it was missing all kinds of files and whatnot and I don't have time for that crap. So now, I ripped the thing apart and took the drive out. There's no bay for the hdd so I literally had to take the entire thing apart.

Anyways, I got the hard drive out (which is a sata btw) and I was going to attach it to my computer. However, I'm a little concerned that all the crap that's on it will spread to my drives and then cause me to go completely insane. I can disconnect the two secondary drives but I will need to leave my primary drive in tact so I can format the little sata drive. Is this a good idea or should I keep that thing as far from my drives as possible?

 

[lopdog]

I'm not sure if this is the easiest way, but you could disconnect all your existing hdd, and only connect your sisters infected drive. Then boot your system from any Linux Live-cd (like Ubuntu), and format the disk from there. Your hdd's would be safe. If you need a guide on how to format a disk in Linux you could try http://www.ehow.com/how_1000631_hard-drive-linux.html.