Clean your hard disk completely for Win95
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): I installed at least three versions of Windows 95 before installing the shipped version I received from Microsoft on Aug. 28. As soon as I got home that evening, I started installing Win95. Like the many other computer users you've read about, I ran into difficulty.
When I finally got Win95 installed, it didn't behave itself. This otherwise highly robust operating system even brought my entire machine to a complete halt a couple of times, forcing me to press the Reset button. I had been having "No Name" and "Magic" viruses on my PCs for about two weeks, so I knew the cause. Unfortunately, none of the anti-virus programs that I had at hand could eliminate the viruses from my hard disks. So I decided to do what I usually do with heavily infected hard disks: Totally destroy their contents.
Virus infection is a fact of life in the computer world. Not swapping diskettes with others or working on other people's PCs is all you can do to limit infection. However, my experience is that you can't be on guard all the time. My computers got sick when I was trying to clean up somebody else's hard disk.
I recently bought a seemingly brand-new hard disk for a client of mine and found that it already had viruses. Never assume, therefore, that a store-bought hard disk is truly fresh from the factory and virus free. Computer stores usually test new hard disks and later re-seal them and sell them as brand-new. This is enough to plague these hard disks with viruses. And make installing Win95 a nightmare.
Totally destroying the hard disk's contents is not reformatting the entire hard disk. Reformatting will not help eliminate viruses, nor will repartitioning the hard disks using the DOS FDISK command. I have a quick and sure way to get rid of viruses.
I usually use either Norton Utilities or PCTools, both of which are now the products of Symantec. Both contain the Disk Editor utility -- my preference is Disk Editor in Norton Utilities. You should have either of them at your disposal.
You will also need virus-free Setup and Install diskettes for DOS, Windows and all applications that you use. You must also have a bootable DOS diskette with DOS FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM -- they must also be free of viruses.
The steps
First, do what every serious computer user should do regularly: Back up all your data.
If you already have Norton Utilities or PCTools installed in your hard disk, you can go ahead and run it. Install it if it isn't already. Once Norton Utilities or PCTools is loaded, you can run Disk Editor. Chances are the program will tell you that it is now running in Read-only mode. You have to change this option. Go to the Configuration menu item and uncheck the option Read-only so you can write to the hard disk.
There are four critical areas in every hard disk: the Partition Table, the Boot Sector, and the 1st and 2nd copies of File Allocation Table. The last two are normally synchronized, so whatever change you make on the first copy of FAT will also affect the second.
You can start with the Boot Sector first, as this region on the hard disk is not touched during the FDISK or FORMAT process. Press Alt-S in PCTools or Alt-O in Norton Utilities to call the Select or Object menu items. Then press the Down Arrow key to Boot Sector (see accompanying illustration). Then go to View and choose text. Place the cursor at the very beginning of the sector and start erasing everything by holding down the space bar until the cursor reaches the end of the Boot Sector. By then all the characters in this area will have disappeared. Then you should go to the Edit menu and issue the command Write Changes. This will write the changes to the hard disk.
You can now move on to the Partition Table by pressing Alt-S or Alt-O again. Then press the Down Arrow key a couple of times until the menu item Partition Table is highlighted. Press Enter and go to View. Select Text again. As in the Boot Sector, place the cursor at the very beginning of the sector and hold the space bar down. When everything is erased, use the Write command to write the changes to the disk.
If you prefer, you can also use the Mark command found under the Edit menu item. After creating a block by highlighting a number of consecutive sectors, you can use the Fill command and replace every character with double-zeros (00). Then use the command Write Changes to make the changes permanent.
After you've erased all the contents in the boot sector and the Partition Table, the hard disk is completely blank. Then you can run FDISK from your floppy diskette to partition the hard disk and make it active. Once the PC has restarted, you can use the FORMAT command to prepare the hard disk.
When all has been properly done, you can reinstall DOS and Windows. Once Windows is up and running, you can proceed with Win95 installation. Unless your system has a hardware problem, Win95 should install smoothly.
The process obviously destroys everything on the hard disk. A backup is therefore all-important prior to running Disk Editor.
If your DOS install diskettes are already infected by a virus, no matter how many times you repeat the procedure I've just described, you'll always end up having viruses on your hard disk. Therefore, it's truly essential to always keep write-protected, virus-free copies of original software as well as a clean DOS bootable diskette.