Hi,

A hacker attacked my laptop and I was told by my ISP help desk that my email account sent out over 21,000 emails and they said I probably have a botnet or an IRC server. I want to wipe my harddrive clean and start over. I have a Dell Inspirion and this infection has rendered my pc useless. I can't do anything with it. So using the OS installation disk that came with the computer, how can I wipe my HD clean and reintsall the OS?

Thank you,

LG

Dell Inspiron what?

Did Dell not provide instructions on using these disks? How many disks do you have from Dell?

Louis

If your computer has the Dell System Recovery partition you can try using it. When the computer first start up press Ctrl+F11, this should be an automated system. This may be of assistance. If your computer doesn't have DSR you can use the method below.

To wipe the drive you will need a utility like Wipe Drive or KillDisk, KillDisk is a free download. You will then need to enter the BIOS to make you CD-ROM the first device in the boot order. You will then place the Killdisk CD in the CD-ROM and restart the computer and the computer will boot from the CD. You will need to determine which of the discs is the installation disc, you will need to place it in the CD-ROM and boot from that as well. This tutorial may help, scroll down to the "Step-by-Step Clean Install.

dc3,

I took your advise along with a few others and I repaired my PC. I wipe the HD clean and installed WIN XP using the Dell provided utiilty disks. My PC is working now.

Thanks again for all your help.

LG