Re-installing Win XP after virus attack

[bigolow]

I recently received a combined virus and trojan infection. As a result of removing the malware using a combination of the AVG Anti-virus and Ad-aware programs, several system programs (ipconfig and msconfig) were deleted, and, in general, the system is now performing poorly. Also, I dont think that the malware is completely removed because the anti-virus and ad-aware programs continually find the same or new infections at almost every boot.

Since I need Win xp for my enginering design software (no counterpart yet for OS X) I would like to perform a new install of the win xp operating system (with SP3). I have already updated the Bootcamp software to 2.1. Can I create a new install of win xp and then delete the old windows directory without causing myself much grief. If not can someone suggest a way of doing this. Thanks

[zarmanto]

There are some rather geeky ways to do what you describe without reformatting the drive (which I assume is the goal here) but frankly, I wouldn't want to take the risk of that virus popping back up again later, myself. Your best course of action would be to perform a backup of your data from that partition, and erase the partition so that you can be sure that you've done a clean install. Then install your anti-virus/anti-malware software before you restore your data, so that you have a better chance of stopping the virus from further infecting your system, if it somehow manages to sneak into your data backup.

Now... having dutifully told you what I'm sure is exactly what you didn't want to hear... one of those geeky options (which doesn't require you to backup and erase the drive) would be to create a new folder at the root of your Windows partition, (perhaps called something like "Previous Installation") and then move all of the files currently on that harddrive into the new folder. You'll need to do this from another OS, and you'll need to make sure that you catch everything, as there are typically several different invisible files and folders at the root of a Windows volume, such as the "System Volume Information" folder. After you've moved everything, you should be able to successfully perform a fresh installation of Windows -- but as before, I strongly recommend that the first thing you do after installing Windows is reinstall your anti-virus/anti-malware software and run a full scan of your harddrive with both.

As an aside, if you decide to move the Windows files from within MacOS X and your Windows partition is formatted as an NTFS volume, then you'll need to make that volume read/write accessible with something like MacFUSE (http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/) with the NTFS-3g (http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/) extension.