dell dimension 3000 - how to wipe clean/format?

Someone has told me (after I gave up on the Dell tech helpline after two
days of being told the same thing) that I probably have a boot sector
virus. ( the situation has spiralled since my last post and am now
frequently evicted from my pc or being told I have dirty ntfs files and
sometimes that I don't even have a hard drive)

Is a boot sector virus fixable? More importantly is it going to be
expensive?

I swear I was fully up to date with the McAfee updates - I can't
understand how this has happened.

All help both prior and further is very much appreciated.

Carmen.


--
whoopidoo

"whoopidoo" wrote in message
...

Someone has told me (after I gave up on the Dell tech helpline after two
days of being told the same thing) that I probably have a boot sector
virus. ( the situation has spiralled since my last post and am now
frequently evicted from my pc or being told I have dirty ntfs files and
sometimes that I don't even have a hard drive)

Is a boot sector virus fixable? More importantly is it going to be
expensive?

I swear I was fully up to date with the McAfee updates - I can't
understand how this has happened.

All help both prior and further is very much appreciated.

Carmen.


--
whoopidoo


Carmen -

And you've run the dell hdd diags. indicating no hardware problem?


Stew

Could you let us know the exact "dirty" message? It sounds like the
partition dirty flag hasn't been reset.


"whoopidoo" wrote in message
...

frequently evicted from my pc or being told I have dirty ntfs files and
sometimes that I don't even have a hard drive)

"Brian K" iibntgyea4 wrote in message
news
Could you let us know the exact "dirty" message? It sounds like the
partition dirty flag hasn't been reset.




What concerns me is that he mentioned the hard drive is at times indicated
as "missing/not found". While this could be a data or power cable to the
drive or system board, it could also indicate an intermittently failing
drive.....

Running the extended read/write tests and SMART tests could help verify such
a failure.


Stew