Reformatting

[jiam1]

I have CA anti-virus, anti-spyware and personal firewall installed on my PC 2 years ago.

Recently, I opened an unopened email which was sent to me by a friend prior to the installation of the CA anti-virus and anti-spyware protection.

The email directed me to a www link and there appeared a nude photo. I knew something was wrong. True enough, I later gathered from this friend who sent the email that her email account has been hijacked and that email was not sent by her.

My PC slows down tremendously thereafter. When I scanned my PC with the anti-virus and anti-spyware, the software could not locate anything.

I downloaded PC Tools antivirus (free edition), it detected several TROJAN (spyware/virus?) on my PC. Even though I successfully removed the TROJANs,
they kept coming back and slows down the speed of my PC.

I have since bought a 120GB hard drive and save some of my important files on this hard drive. I thought of reformatting my PC to get rid once and for all the TROJANs virus and would like to seek advice on the following:

1) Do i need to disconnect my portable hard drive from my PC before reformatting?
2) Would any data saved on my portable hard drive be lost in any circumstances?
3) To save re-installing all my softwares, could I save program softwares that are currently installed on my PC to this my portable hard drive and moved them to C drive after reformatting?
4) I have never reformat my PC personally before but would like to give it a go. Are there any precaution measures that I need to take before, during and after reformatting.

Many thanks in advance.

[tfit]

Hold it!!!
Before reformatting anything do the fix dance routine. I assume you're using xp. Ok, right click on your taskbar, task management and look for processes that use a lot of your cpu. It's likely when you stop it there it will restart another process. So write down the process name. Removing files is easier with decent file manager. Get something like totalcommander. Ok, restart your pc in safemode and look remove the file you wrote down earlier. restart again and see if the process reappears again. If it does you might look in your registry or services.

[tech_support]

You're actually better off formatting yourself, and getting a better virus scanner. It's fairly easy to format, just backup your data, scan that data using your AV, THEN format.

[tfit]

I agree to some extend. Making sure everything is completely safe, formatting would be my advice. But looking at the 3th question I might see problems. And I don't know if there is a restore or a full installation cd. So better be safe (sort of) than sorry

[Rai_87]

U should do some partition when u format so that ur important document will not be loss and get better anti virus to prevent trojan, worms and other virus