where to post - wipe & restore drive questions

[patrickosu]

Hi

New here, but have been reading & learning a great deal the last couple days...My first question is where should this be posted?

I got some malware and started to try and clean. It seemed to get worse, and now i have given up and would like to wipe my drive. I have my old drive that is 2 months old that I plan to image-copy back onto the infected drive (re-formatted). The infected drive has files on it that i need. My last back-up is a week old but need some files that have changed since then (outlook, doc, xls, etc)

Can I attach the infected drive to a good PC without infecting the good pc?

What files are safe to copy to the clean drive?

Could a week-old back-up be infected? Can malware lurk on a pc and show up later?

I noticed the infection when I clicked on link in google and searchfindsite webpage opened up. Eventually task manager wouldn't run, and when re-booted I got into a log-in error.

PC: thinkpad laptop, winXP sp3,
Also have Win 7 machine I could copy files onto.

[TimW]

Moved to software.

The safest thing for you to do is backup your personal data immediately since your PC could possibly become unbootable at any point in time. Do not back up any executable files. This includes programs that you have downloaded since any of them could be infected. Anything you may have already backed up that is an executable type file (things you downloaded to install programs....etc) are most likely infected and will cause you to be reinfected if you reuse these files.

Once you backup, you need to format partitions and reinstall Windows and all other software especially your protection software. Then install all updates for all software. DO NOT reinstall from any executable file backups you made while this PC was infected or you will just be reinstalling the infection. You need to have all your AV and AS programs installed first and updated, then you can check that anything you want to reimage is clean.