Reformatting my PC

[Bilge Rat]

Looks like I have a virus, and it's a pretty nasty one that appears to be replicating itself. At the moment the only symptom is a constant steam of alerts from my Anti-virus software but I generally believe that the best thing to do in these situations is reformat the hard drive. Windows can really do with reformatting every few years anyway. I'm just pissed off because I just started playing World of Warcraft again and it will take me a couple of days to re-download all the patches

Happily I just got a new secondary internal drive and have recently backed up most of my stuff. My only concern is that dumb Windows will attempt to format this as well when I reinstall the OS. I will tell it to just reformat the C:\ drive but I am concerned that it will just do the usual dumb Microsoft thing and reformat my backup D:\ drive as well. It is probably quite unlikely, but then I don't want to take a risk and lose everything. Can anyone confirm that reinstalling Windows will only wipe the drive that I am installing it on? Should I open up my PC and physically disconnect the other drive just to be sure that Bill Gates isn't messing with it?

[Bilge Rat]

I didn't trust sneaky Windows so I made sure to physically disconnect my drive before letting it reformat the other one. However, I was somewhat surprised to find that even the contents of the formatted drive appear to have been left intact. I think it just reinstalled Windows over the top of itself, fixing the registry problems and nuking the virus. All my data is still there so I don't need to copy it again, World of Warcraft still works without me having to re-download the patches and I seem to have lost very little as a result of the format.

The only thing I forgot to backup was my browser favourites, so I am left with ones that must be about a year old. However, when I last reinstalled Windows I seem to remember having the same problem, except that the bookmarks mysteriously restored themselves a few days later without me doing anything. We shall see

[CcraiggyO]

What method did you use to re-format it, if you don't mind me interrupting your monologue

[Bilge Rat]

I told it to boot from the Windows (Vista 32bit) CD and followed the instructions. I'm using the word 'reformat' but I suspect that it didn't actually format the drive, just overwrite the system files. Works for me.

It's a bit wierd though because although all my programs are still physically on the disk I can't use them because Windows doesn't 'know' they are there. I have mostly just told it to reinstall stuff and then written over the old files. For whatever reasons though, World of Warcraft simply worked and started up as soon as I ran the .exe in the directory. It even added it to the 'installed programs' list after I had run it

[Itchigon]

It wouldn't reformat your extra drive unless you told it to, no need to unplug it lol. Yea I remember I had to reformat and copied my entire WoW folder over to my extra drive then dragged it back after the format and it worked perfectly, addons and everything, twas great.