Need to completely >>WIPE<< hard drive

I'm having a recurring problem with a PC and I think it's got a boot sector virus. If I boot to the Vista install disc and choose to delete the partition, will that wipe the boot sector? I'm having some issues using 3rd party tools because the motherboard is "locked" on AHCI for the SATA drives making them non-existent to most 3rd party tools, and there is no setting in the BIOS to change this. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

. . . and a very Happy New Year to all!!! :wine

 

This article should help dlb

http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/bootsectexe-modifies-the-bootsector-not-the-mbr/

 

I usually connect a drive as slave and do that through Disk Management. Helps when you have several machines at your disposal.(or a spare space and another active disk in your single machine).

 

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=185843.

 

Thanks for the input, but it turns out that the virus may not have been in the boot sector; here's what happened: I was going to install a clean Vista on this PC, and in preparation, I downloaded the drivers to the desktop before wiping, then copied these drivers to my thumb drive. I wiped the PC, installed clean Vista, but as soon as the first driver was installed, the whole thing went into the toilet. So I re-formatted, and did it all again with a different HD thinking that either the original HD was faulty or had a boot sector infection. Well, the original HD was infected, and it proceeded to infect the drivers I had downloaded and transferred to my flash drive. When installed the drivers in the clean Vista, I ended up infecting the system, and was constantly getting errors about the drivers being unsigned and that their source could not be verified. I ran a full MBAM and Avira scan on the thumb drive, and sure enough, the chipset "setup.exe" had been infected, and several of the audio driver files were infected too. :banghead I suppose it goes without saying that the thumb drive has since been completely wiped clean. I'm just glad I didn't use the flash drive on any other PCs or I could have had a VERY serious problem!!!!
LOL