Boot sector virus/external USB devices

Hello everyone.

Recently I have removed a boot sector virus on both computers in my network (yes, both of them. It was not fun) and just before I had diagnosed it as a boot sector virus, I noticed that my external hard drive was acting very erratic. Now that both computers are clean, would it be safe to plug in my external USB drive/flash stick?

I would think that the drives don't have a boot sector and could not be infected but I just want to know some other opinions before I possibly plunge myself into writing 0s for hours.

I currently have 2 virus scanners running. AntiVir and AVG free (yeah both freebies). Any suggestions or should I just plug er it and see what does down? (hopefully not the computer) I got 2 years of data on this drive. arggg

 

Sorry I did not read the post that said read this first.... I will use Antivir only. Sorry...

 

I can garantee that removal has been successful on all machines that were originally infected. I decided to plug it in and see what happened anyways.

Basically it didn't go well.

USB drive is detected, OS installs the drivers. The drive isn't being shown in my computer. I then rebooted the computer and it went completely nuts.

wrote 0s, ripped out memory, re-installed. back to square one.

I might try and plug it into a mac. Dont even know if they use the same type of boot sector system.

Thanks for the advice though. This problem is a very annoying one

 

Yup. You hit it right on the head there.

This is what I was thinking....

I would open up the tower and unplug the hard drive and boot off of a linux or windows live CD or something (anything write protected) and then wipe the drive. I need something that can write 0s to the drive though to compeltely erraticate it. hmmmm.

Slowly working this mofo out. It's a nasty one.

 

I was in the understanding that writing 0s destroyed all data on the drive including the boot sector and parition table. If this wasn't true, then the virus would have come back on the PCs that I attempted to remove, which didn't happen.

Writing 0s is considered a mid-level format, which is basically the way the drive comes out of the factory.

Single pass zeros took care of the problem on my PCs. I'm just waiting to get some school work done so I can save and then try some other things.