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The laptop is infected with some sort of bad stuff (virus? Trojan? malware? etc). I am thinking of wiping it clean and reinstal Win7 "from scratch".

I am running Win7 from an HP Probook, which has a D-partition titled "HP_recovery". From the HP website, it's possible to reinstall Win7 from D-partition.

The questions are, since the laptop is infected (although most scans turned up clean - yet browsers still get "redirect"):

(1) is the D-partition also infected?

(2) can "standard recovery protocol" completely wipe clean C partition and reinstall Win7 in D-partition (assuming it's clean)?

Any advice ?? Great many thanks.

Jeroen
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B Chen
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2 Answers2

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Standard protocol would be to wipe the hard drive(s) completely clean and install from known good read-only media.

A malware also modifying the windows 7 copy on the recovery partition is conceivable. But whether or not the malware you have did that is something we can not tell you without looking at your machine.

Philipp
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  • Thanks. Sounds like the only way to find out is to go ahead reinstall and see if the "new" C partition is still acting up. Is this understanding correct? – B Chen Jan 17 '16 at 16:44
  • @BChen When you have nothing to lose but your time, then trying can't hurt. – Philipp Jan 17 '16 at 16:48
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Re-installing your hard drive is most likely your best option. The D partition will only be usable if you have the OS-specific recovery media. If you feel the problem is worth trying to track down, you might learn something.

Here is a list of some tools that could come in handy:

CCleaner - clean unnecessary files, sorts registry problems, change startup, wipe drives and more.

Malwarebytes Anti Malware - Anti Malware protection (free version is good. Source:Myself)

Malwarebytes Rootkit detector - Detects for rootkits on startup (free)

AVG 2015 Free edition - Virus prevention software. Has kept my system clean with no problems for over 2 years now.

Sypbot 2 - Very good tool, immunises files, searches for adware etc

Process Explorer - Very useful tool you can use to identify what and when things are running on your computer

TCP/IP Viewer - Great tool that identifies all incoming/outgoing connections. You could troubleshoot a lot of internet problems using this tool.

schroeder
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Star's Studio
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