Taking virus protection to an illogical extreme


Q Can I remove a memory-resident virus ù or any virus ù by running DOS's Fdisk and Format commands to wipe out everything on my hard drive?

û Victor Heimur

A Don't do it! Reformatting your hard drive takes a huge amount of work and probably won't kill the virus. After all, your boot floppy may also be infected ù or your Fdisk or Format programs. Or you could reinfect your system while reinstalling your applications. And some viruses, like Monkey, can survive an Fdisk reformat and make things even worse.

If your antivirus program can't fix the problem, contact the vendor. There may be a solution in the works, and if not, the experts in the lab will want to see what you've got.

û Lincoln Spector


Category:antivirus
Issue: November 1998

These Web pages are produced by Australian PC World © 1998 IDG Communications