flatline it?

not sure if this is the best place to ask, but none of the other forums seemed appropriate. anyhow, my computer is very very sick, and fixing it would take loads of time. so, since i don't have very much software on it (that I installed, at least, ha ha ha), i'm thinking about just doing a clean install of the os and starting over.

my question is, would just reformatting the drive and reinstalling the os be enough to clean it up?

long long ago when i was a tech for a while, we would knock out the partition to the mbr just to make sure, but that was in the days of a: drives, and i knew how to make a bootable disk to fdisk, format and reinstall. now, everyting has gone way beyond me and i'll have to install from an external usb cd drive.

i have no idea if that made any sense, i've had loads of coffee and not breakfast yet! what are your thoughts (and, if this isn't the right place to post, where is?). thanks- efi

 

best place would be Software I think.
However what you said what you did when you were still a techie still goes.

bootdisk > fdisk > format > reinstall

 

i guess the root concern is, how much nasty stuff might be in the mbr? it is my understanding that fdisk doesn't knock out that partition, and i THINK that if i knock out that partition, i wouldn't be able to boot off a usb drive. ha ha, a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous! thanks-efi

 

If you're using XP, then you should be able to boot directly off the CD (as long as you can boot from a CD drive), and from there you can delete the partition, create a new partition format and install. And this should re-write the MBR too.

Generally the worst a virus can do to the MBR is screw it up a bit. True MBR viruses are few and far between these days.

 

thank you, thank you, and thank you, in that order!