Need urgent help - Netsky virus

[jellyhead]

A friend turned her pc on to find that all her program files had gone - IE6 included. I brought it over to my house, formatted the drive, re-installed Win98 and plugged it into my router (Bigpond cable). On start up I'd get a msg saying something about an vbix file not being found. So I thought I'd upgrade to WinMe thinking that missing file would be re-installed. About 10% into setup of WinME it stopped with an error msg SU0325. Checked this on google and found a MS KB article about it being possibly a virus or trojan but most likely a damaged or dirty cd. I shut the pc down and intended leaving it for another day. Now the CD is scratched a fair bit BUT about 1/2 hour later up pops an alert on my pc's screen VET has discovered a resident virus NetSky. My question is if my friend's pc WAS infected could it have passed through to my pc through the router? Also, assuming it was a virus that caused all the program files to go missing, does a re-format not fix this, or is a new hard drive required or what? It's not possible to connect to the net to get a removal tool. Also when I did have Win98 running on my friend's pc I typed cmd in "run" and it wouldn't run dos but would re-start in DOS mode. Sorry for the long post. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[StormBringer]

you said you formatted and reinstalled, then connected to your network. I have yet to meet a virus that could survive a proper format.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Originally posted by jellyhead
about 1/2 hour later up pops an alert on my pc's screen VET has discovered a resident virus NetSky. My question is if my friend's pc WAS infected could it have passed through to my pc through the router?

No, if this happened during ME install - its networking isn't enabled when it's in installing stage. If it happened after installation, it still sounds unlikely, as you said the drive was formatted (see StormBringer's reply).

Netsky is a virus that is transferred via e-mail as an executable, so the only way you can get infected is by running the attachment app or by having an e-mail app that does it automatically.

when I did have Win98 running on my friend's pc I typed cmd in "run" and it wouldn't run dos but would re-start in DOS mode.

Win98 doesn't use cmd, but command.com instead (Can be found from Start Menu - Accessories if I remember correctly). You can configure it not to use MS-DOS mode via its properties.

 

[Subsane]

probably unrelated but I get about 10 emails a day that are infected with that netsky virus....really annoying I can't pinpoint where it's coming from....doesn't matter how many times I block the sender.

 

[jellyhead]

Thanks for all your help guys. The PC is now up and running with the HP Recovery Disk. Now if I could just find an ethernet card that works I can do all the updates on my cable, rather than my friend's dial up. There's a truckload of ethernet adaptors in the TCP/IP settings - HP ones - which I thought were onboard but it won't pick up the LAN connection. Never mind :S

 

[lowman]

You can pick one up for cheap to hold you over until you get a proper one...