Welcome sugar69 to the CNET XP Forums,
I am assuming you have backed up all personal files you want to keep.
This is a 300 GB drive, of which the trojan is controlling 280 GB?
The only way to ensure that you regain control of the drive is to wipe it completely. Use a free tool from Darik's Boot and Nuke website to completely reset the boot sector and MBR of the drive to better than factory specifications.
See: http://www.dban.org/ or http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/how-to-really-erase-a-hard-drive/129 or http://www.killdisk.com/ Any one of these will do the job.
WARNING: ALL DATA ON THE DRIVE WILL BE ERASED AND LOST.
Use one of these free utilities AFTER recovering your files. See below.
If you do not want to use a wipe utility, skip Ubuntu and wipe downloads and go to the bottom of this post. You will find links describing your problem exactly.
If you have not yet recovered your files, go here and download Ubuntu here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
Either burn the .iso file (it is large, some 678 MB) to a CD or USB stick. Simply copying the .iso file to CD will not work as this file is compressed; you need to open the file to unpack it when burning. In Nero, double-clicking the .iso file will open and then burn the file to disk. You will know if it worked when you insert the CD into the CD drive and reboot the computer. Upon reboot, the Ubuntu page will appear with a keyboard logo, hit enter as soon as you see this page. You will be presented with an option for language, (default is English) hit enter, select 'Try Ubuntu without making changes' and let the CD boot up your system.
You will need another media such as a CD-R or hard drive to copy these files from your infected partition.
Ubuntu does not make any changes to your system unless you choose to install it. As such, it is a virtual operating system when it is run without installing.
I recommend using the LTS (Long Term Service) option for downloading. This would be version 10.04.4, as this is supported for three years after the introduction date on April 29th, 2010, as version 10.04.0.
Once your files have been backed up, wipe the drive using one of the above wipe utilities above. Select a wipe parameter higher than 'zero' to wipe the drive clean. As this drive is large, expect it to take quite some time to complete this task.
Once you have thoroughly wiped the drive, quick-formatting the disk as NTFS should be sufficient to restore usability and access to your drive. You should then be able to do a complete 'clean' install of your XP Pro installation disk.
This is not a re-install.
You will need to completely update Windows from scratch, re-install all programs you wish to run, install a/v, firewall, etc.
Enter "free security programs for windows xp" in the search box in Google to get a representative list of free security programs (without the quotes) for a listing of free programs on Google; all are known good websites (for at least the first page). Do not click 'sponsored advertisers' link as this is not a part of the known-good website listings.
If none of the above options are what you are looking for see the next websites listed below:
http://forums.pcpitstop.com/index.php?/topic/78068-windows-xp-setup-unable-to-delete-partition/
OR
http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/InstallXPPro/installxppro1.htm
Hope this helps.
mchainmchain
XP Home Edition SP3 2GB RAM
I recently had to wipe my system clean, due to a nasty trojan. I was going to reinstall win xp pro, but it would not let me delete the infected partition, so I created a new partition.. Everything works fine, except for the fact that it is using 280 gb, of a 300gb hard drive. Can someone please help me to delete the old partition. Thanks.
Chowhound
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