Dell Inspiron 15 laptop infected with Trojan

[cosmicempathy]

Hello,

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop with Windows 8 that is infected with a Trojan Virus. The laptop has crashed and will no longer boot to Windows.

My question is- Before I re-install the OS with my recovery media, do I need to do any kind of low level/standard format of the hard drive to get rid of the virus?? Or can I just do a clean install of the OS to be rid of the virus completely??

 

[rgd1101]

factory restore should to do it.

 

[Prostar Computer]

You do not need to format anything. The recovery will take care of everything. If your recovery partition is corrupt, then you'll need to either send it to Dell for them to perform a factory recovery, or you will need to reinstall the OS yourself.

 

[cosmicempathy]

@rgd1101- thanks for your response!

@ Prostar Computer - Any thoughts on running Kill Disk before I re-install the OS? I REALLY want to make sure there aren't any nasty virus files hiding somewhere in the hard drive. I don't need to send it to Dell, as I can download the recovery program from the Dell website and install it myself.

 

[Prostar Computer]

Nope, no nuking/wiping is necessary. When you run the recovery process, it is going to replace your existing .dll files, cab files, registry entries, etc. - all the things that could have been hit by a virus - with copies from the original factory image. So unless Dell placed a bootstrap loader or two in the image, you're good to go with the factory recovery.

 

[cosmicempathy]

Nope, no nuking/wiping is necessary. When you run the recovery process, it is going to replace your existing .dll files, cab files, registry entries, etc. - all the things that could have been hit by a virus - with copies from the original factory image. So unless Dell placed a bootstrap loader or two in the image, you're good to go with the factory recovery.

Sounds good! Thank you kindly for your help!

 

[Prostar Computer]

Anytime!