Will replacing the hard drive in my computer fix virus problems?

If there is a virus, 90% of the time it will reside on a hard drive (either the C: drive or any other hard drive attached to the system).

9.9% of the remaining time, the virus could be on an external storage source, such as a floppy drive or USB thumb drive.

The remaining 0.1% of the time you could have a BIOS virus. These are extremely rare, but they do exist. I would be shocked if you had one, however. If you DO happen to have one, you're in a very bad way... a BIOS virus will re-infect even a clean install and they are very difficult to get rid of. In fact, a bad enough BIOS virus will almost force you into buying a new computer since the only way to rid yourself of it is to replace your motherboard.

In order to rid yourself of your virus you could buy a new drive as you asked. Yes, once you take your old hard drive out and install the new one EVERYTHING will be gone from your PC. You'll have to re-install Windows and all your software and you should be back at square one.

In fact, you don't even need to spend any money to do this. Download and run an application like DBAN:

http://www.dban.org/

DBAN is a low-level drive reformatter... you boot it from a CD-ROM (so you are not booting from the infected hard drive) and DBAN will then totally scramble every single sector on your hard drive. Finally, after it has scrambled the drive it will write a zero to every single sector on the drive, basically this places your hard drive in the exact same state it was in when it was factory-fresh... since every sector is zeroed out, nothing will survive the process.

Once you have a clean drive in place, either by installing a new hard drive or nuking your old hard drive, you'll want to be very careful when transferring data. You could easily re-corrupt yourself while using external data sources. If you back up any files and folders to a thumb drive, external hard drive or network source and those files are infected you will re-infect yourself once you copy those files back on to your freshly cleaned system. Whether you believe they work or not, make sure you have a good antivirus application installed on your cleaned computer BEFORE you attempt to recopy any files from your old system. Carefully scan those files on the external data sources before copying them back over and attempting to open or run them! I would hate for you to do all the work of reformatting and reinstalling a complete system only to re-infect yourself from an old file.

Well replacing your hard drive isn't the solution, but yes if you physically remove your hard drive and replace with a new, blank drive any virus' will be gone.

But you'll also no longer have a working computer until you install your operating system (Windows), all of your software, and ensure your hardware is properly configured. And of course you'll lose all your data. This is not a do it yourself project unless you have some knowledge and experience with computers.

The proper way to solve this problem is to use security software to identify and remove the problem. It sounds like you are not even sure if you have a virus problem, it could be bad hardware starting to show itself, or any of a million sofware issues. If you're unsure, have a professional IT person take a look, they can probably diagnose the problem for a fairly low price.

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You *can* upgrade your hard drive on most laptops although it might require some minor surgery. However, viruses won't necessarily kill a hard drive. Before you buy any new hardware and go to the trouble of installing it, I recommend wiping your current partition (windows setup will allow you to do this if you boot your computer from the Windows CD-ROM) and installing a fresh copy of XP that way, onto your old drive. If this works, the hard drive was the problem, and at that point you can decide to get a 120gb drive for space-reasons, or stick with what you have. If it doesn't work, well, getting a new hard drive wouldn't have fixed the problem anyway and you'd better check something else.

Replacing Computer Hard Drive

It is possible to place a virus in the BIOS of a computer. I doubt that you have that as it is not something that most people know how to do.

I read what you wrote about downloading a free program, but, Antivir is rated as the best of the best.

I was a tester for both Symantec and McAfee, and Antivir found a few test viruses that the later two did not find. However, if a trojan is in your BIOS, you're smoked.

I am a professional developer with Microsoft, and have about 10 years of experience in the field of Computer Engineering. Most problems with PC's are the result of malicious software that infected a Computer. Examples of this are things such as malware, viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, root kits, and worms. In other cases, they are the result of stability issues due to crashes, freezes, or Hardware Issues. Some examples of hardware issues could be a dirty cooling fan causing the computer to overheat, or low memory due to lack of RAM, which could cause the PC to run slowly. You may think it could be a virus, or malware, or registry issues, but it could be something else entirely. As a computer layman, one may find it hard to really ascertain what exactly is causing the problems, without having a professional do an in depth analysis of your PC.

As professional computer repairs can be quite costly, I would recommend to you a Software that many of us in the tech department here at Microsoft use personally and professionally to diagnose and repair computer problems very quickly. It is a software called Reimage, from https://reimagefix.im/ .. In my personal experience, and in the experience of many of my associates, this is probably the best software ever created for those experiencing computer troubles. This is likely to remedy just about ANY problem your computer could possibly be having, and have it running like new. Reimage has won several awards, and been featured in publications such as PC Mag.

Hahahahahahahaha. Oh god please tell me you're joking? Malwarebytes will get anything on there, if there's something to get. Your YEARS of computer knowledge should tell you that. You might want to replace your graphics card. Might be lurking there hahaha.

Just format it and reinstall Windows.

lllllllooooooolllllllll

Download and install Google Chrome. Use Chrome to download and install Malwarebytes. This should take care of the problem.

How could you tell if its a BIOS virus??