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    M1330 F8 factory restore and virus?

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by NOS, Jul 17, 2009.

  1. NOS

    NOS Notebook Geek

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    recently got hit with a bunch of trojans when using Internet Explorer. I managed to clean them off or so I thought. Periodically, when I open Internet Explorer my virus scanner detects a trojan. Since the original trojan screwed up my computer to a degree I had decided to reload my operating system anyway. If I hit F8 at boot and do a factory restore will this reload the disk to the state it was in when I originally received it? Will this also get rid of these viruses that seem to still be plaguing my system?
     
    NOS, Jul 17, 2009
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  2. BlackRussian

    BlackRussian Notebook Deity

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    Before under going a factory reinstall
    1.update your antivirus, live update. so you have the latest database.
    2.turn off system restore. virus infection may well still be on your system within Restore points.
    3.when scanning boot up in safemode and run AV scan. (if poss use a dos base AV scanner)

    Back to your main point if you still have your factory image still on hard drive then yes.
     
    BlackRussian, Jul 17, 2009
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  3. NOS

    NOS Notebook Geek

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    Thanks for the help. Unfortunately, the viruses have screwed up windows and made it unstable at times. I have no choice other than to reload at this point. I was just worried that the virus may have gotten into the recovery partition and cause problems with a factory reinstall.
     
    NOS, Jul 17, 2009
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  4. BlackRussian

    BlackRussian Notebook Deity

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    Your recovery partition should be fine just follow the recovery details.
    Sorry to hear about your System going AWOL.
     
    BlackRussian, Jul 17, 2009
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  5. Samuel613

    Samuel613 Notebook Evangelist

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    I think the Dell recovery partition uses an image of a "clean" Windows installation (plus drivers and such) so I can't imagine a virus would actually modify the image to have itself copied when the image is used after reformatting the main partition.

    If you really want to make sure, you can run sfc /scannow after you've performed the recovery.
     
    Samuel613, Jul 17, 2009
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