Is formatting an infected Lenovo T61 HDD a better option?

[V.V.S. Kambli]

Now here the problem is that my T61’s HDD has been infected with I guess everything that is possible i.e. malware, virus, worms, Trojan. In short it has been badly infected and refuses to function properly.

When consulted many people, most of them said that formatting is the only option and solution for this issue if I really wanted to get rid of these huge number of infections. Now I just wanted to confirm from you that is it fine if I do a complete formatting of my HDD, will it harm my system badly? Or else there are other better options which can be considered?

[Zared]

If you are not aware let me tell you, there are many different type of threats which possibly infects and attacks your system. If you plan to format then for your kind information not all but most of the information stealing threats will be removed and deleted but some threats like BIOS infected threads won’t be removed by anyhow even if you format the HDD.

And if you have been infected by any of these mentioned above then you will have to remove the components that have been dropped on the HDD and then you will have to flash your motherboard’s BIOS.

[Jugo]

Obviously formatting the whole HDD does help and creates a major difference between you infected HDD and formatted HDD. Everyone knows that formatting the system or HDD definitely removes and deletes everything along with all the infections that caused the problems.

But yes you will have to definitely to take the backup of everything which is required and necessary for you in future. Formatting the HDD is of no use if you do not take the back of the files and other important information.

[Captain Samuel Salt]

What if it’s a file infector? Obviously if we do not realize about the file which is infected and take the back up of that infected file into clean drive then definitely first of the taking the backup will make no sense as we have backed up the file infector along with the data and also the HDD will again get infected if we restore the same back up data to the formatted HDD. So better we should first remove the file infector and then take the back up of the data before performing any the format operation.

If asked me about the BIOS infector then obviously I would have treated the BIOS infector as a normal windows virus. Never heard more about these BIOS infectors, these threats are new to me somehow.

[Bhuvana21]

There are quite different ways to know whether a motherboard BIOS is infected or not. One of them which I know is that even after you format your HDD, after booting the computer will automatically show some infection sign or some other unusual symptoms of infection.

And also if most of the antivirus security tools or software fails to detect any virus or anything in your system but still your machine show those common infected symptoms then probably you must assume that its you motherboard’s BIOS that has been infected.