How Best to Nuke a Drive with Bad Image

I’d like some advice on using DBAN or Heidi’s Eraser. I want to get everything off the hard drive and start over. So, if you’d like to comment on just that, please go ahead and you can skip the long tale of woe that follows that is the reason for my request. Or read on, your choice!

I have a Lenovo 3000 H200 with 1.6 GHz Atom and 160 GB HD. I was hit with a”Bad Image” problem several months ago. Tried to go back to an earlier time with ERUNT backups because System Restore was broken. Going back never seemed that stable, and system restore still would not work. I’d had a HP Photosmart 2570 printer hooked up but it would not feed paper (oh, the joys of having to fiddle with all my technical equipment!), so I removed it and uninstalled the HP software. Then I kept getting a message that the scanner.msi file was needed and the answer I came up with in Google to fix it was to insert the HP printer CD and let the file be copied. I did so and then later discovered that I had a Remote Fax and 3 printers installed and a folder HP Files Moved, despite having no physical printer attached.

I swear it seemed like bot herders or gremlins or something was controlling the computer!

Having been away from home for several weeks so far this year, I’ve only recently attempted to get this computer back in shape. Not wanting to deal with the original 160 GB HD and its Lenovo recovery partition until I had something else working, I bought a 250 GB Hitachi HD and installed it in the second HD bay and just moved the SATA cable and power connections to it. Lenovo had also included a restore CD. I booted from that and installed Windows XP SP2 on the new drive. I then used my first Acronis True Image backup DVD and restored an image that I had made shortly after I got the computer. I did not choose to rewrite MBR and Track 0 (should I have?). I got a message that data was successfully restored.

I rebooted and set a restore point. I adjusted Active X settings, uninstalled Adobe Reader 7.05 and Trend Micro expired trial and the OKAVAgent that went with it. Ran CCleaner and defragged. When I tried to make an Acronis backup to DVD, I kept getting an error message. I went on with downloading current Spywareblaster, SAS, MBAM, Spybot, Mozilla FF, Java, PCTools FW and XP SP3 from a CD I had made on another computer.

I then hooked up to DSL and got a bunch of FW messages and BSODs. I got a bunch more Windows Updates, FW update and IE7. On installing Open Office at first there were errors but then it seemed OK. From Firefox I got Adobe Flash plugin, but Flash would not install in IE—kept giving errors. And then, to top it all off, part of the text on the Web pages disappeared (like every third line or so but more random than that) and I got the Bad Image message!

ARRGGHH! Now you know why I want to nuke the hard drive and start over. I have tried to find out what causes Bad Image and it appears it can be anything from malware to other software problems to maybe even hardware problems. I decided to look in Event Viewer today and I have a bunch of errors involving Acronis True Image Home and then Acronis Test Program on the day I restored the image. Plus frequent Microsoft Fax Warning entries about no faxes until a fax device is installed.

I am wondering if there was a problem with the Acronis True Image DVD image I made. Version 10.0, first time I had ever used it.

Anyway, I can try a restore with the restore CD and the drivers CD only this next time. Will DBAN or Eraser wipe everything from the HD? Including MBR? I want a truly blank slate.

Any other suggestions on how to get all the other software and items from the How to Protect Yourself from Malware sticky on this computer would be much appreciated. That’s where I was aiming when I got hit with that Bad Image again. Thanks.