About 2 years ago I met a virus which resided in boot area and mbr area,
antivirus did not help, format did not help  and fdisk /mbr did not help
too. I think it is better to use some disk editor such as Norton Disk Editor
from boot floppy and edit mbr manually (set all bytes to 00 then use fdisk
/mbr) than using low level format, which can be very problematic. Best way
to protect hdd from boot viruses is to make a boot floppy with backup of mbr
a boot record made by some antivirus. When virus found then simply boot from
floppy and recover boot and mbr and all is fine :-)

Mike Belicek
mailto:[log in to unmask]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vic Hlushak [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 1999 8:04 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: [PCBUILD] Low Level Format
>
> I have been doing this for 20 years and I have never seen or even heard
> from
> a reputable source that Fdisk /MBR can damage a HDD. All it does is
> overwrite the Master Boot Record.
>
> Vic, A+
>
> > -----Original Message-----
>  You can rewrite this area using FDISK /MBR, but with some
> > viruses this may permanently damage the drive.
> > David G
>
>                          PCBUILD's List Owner's:
>                       Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
>                         Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                        Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>