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Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

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app103:
Say that I wind up formatting his desktop's HDD.  Virus gone: *POOF*.  But will I then be able to access the CD-ROM, or will I be missing the drivers necessary to do that because I just formatted them out of existence?
-kyrathaba (September 16, 2011, 08:01 PM)
--- End quote ---

The only time I ever needed drivers installed to use a CD drive on a PC with no OS was when there was a controller card sitting between the CD drive and the motherboard, and it wasn't CD drivers that were needed, it was for the controller card.

If you wipe it and can't get the CD drive to work, it's most likely a bad CD drive.

Consider when building a brand new computer that has never had an OS, never had any drivers installed on it. Once you have finished putting the hardware together, you pop in the CD to install the OS and it works. Some interesting magic if it needs to have drivers installed in order to work, huh? Where would you have them installed to if you don't have an OS? And what media would they come on...a CD? That would create a hell of a catch-22 where you need the CD drive to work so you can install the drivers, which require you to have an OS installed first, but you can't install the OS or the drivers because the CD drive won't work.

Optical drives are standardized for just this reason. They don't need drivers except maybe for extra features that deviate from the standard, which you wouldn't be able to use until you had an OS installed any way.

kyrathaba:
Thanks, app!  Sounds like I can safely assume it's a bad CD drive, if it fails to work after getting rid of the virus.

Stoic Joker:
Thanks, app!  Sounds like I can safely assume it's a bad CD drive, if it fails to work after getting rid of the virus.
-kyrathaba (September 17, 2011, 06:35 AM)
--- End quote ---

Even with a boot sector virus, if the CD is ahead of the HDD in the boot sequence, and it still isn't booting ... Safe bet the CD-ROM drive is bad.

On days where time and or hardware are scarce. I've used a Trinity Rescue Disk to boot an infected machine to its Linux/Samba server share, mapped a drive letter to it, and then scanned the mapped drive with AV from another machine.

It's also generally best to update/rewrite the MBR before booting back into the "cleaned" drive to be sure nothing is lurking there for later reinfection.

4wd:
Before you toss out the optical drive you could try cleaning the lens with a camera lens blower brush, (like this).

That's assuming it's the normal tray type laptop drive where the lens is exposed when you eject the tray.  You never know, it could be as simple as dust stopping the laser from reading the disc.

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