Reformatting help please

[fredfloggle]

I wouldnt reformat... chances are you'll get more viruses on the PC before you get a chance to do all the windows updates and antivirus updates. If you do go this route, at least make sure you have local copies of XP SP2 somewhere and the latest antivirus DAT files so that you are at least this up to date before you connect to the internet. My record on a freshly built PC was 14 seconds after connecting to the internet, it had a virus.. just by connecting.

Rebuilding the PC is a real last resort, all those updates, all those drivers, all that software and user configs. I never format my PC's I just fix them. My main home PC has never been formatted. It started life in 1995, has gone through 11 motherboard/CPU upgrades, and has been upgraded from 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP and now Vista. Never once has it been rebuilt from scratch.

If you rebuild it means the virus/problem has beaten you.

I think you need to moderate the websites you visit Spike . You would actually have to physically try to get a virus to do what you did .

Very little will survive an FDISK and format , and if this is a desktop PC , then pay £5 and buy a floppy if only for temporary use . If you set your CD Rom drive as primary boot device and you have a legal copy of Windoze , the you shouldn't have a problem .....

My PC too has software that takes days rather than minutes to install , and some very expensive licenses - I can't praise ghost enough - no nasty virus scanners for me , except one on a memory stick that I use very occasionally , and a rebuild in ten minutes , even with a new hard drive .

Just be careful if you try to ghost and restore to RAID or any othered mirrored drive setup

and do be careful if you are using a "naughty" copy of xp pro without SP2 , the SP2 upgrade can and will detect dodgy serial numbers , and halt windoze dead .....though of course no venerable Merc owner would have any dodgy software ......

 

[scotth_uk]

...is probably over 100 hours work.

I nearly spat out my coffee. On a slow day it would take me about 6 hours to rebuild my entire box, right back to the data restoration. What the hell do you have on yours?

...would you suggest the same with all servers too? Servers are far easier to build than a PC as they generally serve only one or two purposes and have little to reinstall.

As mentioned above, I don't hold the same opinion for servers. In my experience with Windows, it's more the desktop applications install/uninstall that cause the problems to Windows, rather than file and print sharing activities.

 

[masqueraid]

mean time to infection

You would actually have to physically try to get a virus to do what you did

Average time to passively acquire infection on connecting a clean machine to the Net is less than 15 minutes. The risk is now so high that most of the big antivirus houses now use pre-infected machines for their test boxes as they are more accurate representations of what is happening in the real world situation.

14 seconds is quick but that's what having an average time to first infection is about - it means someone else took over half an hour!

 

[Chris_J]

Crikey o riley, 100 hours is a bit insane. Are you using floppy disks? I could understand if you had about 5 or 6 gig of software (sort of).

Get yourself a copy of Ghost, it's only about £30 and will save you a lot of hassle. It's easy enough to update too for anything you add, of course you need to keep it clean though

 

[Sp!ke]

The 100 hour figure is due to having literally hundreds of worthwhile applications on that PC built up over the years that would need installing from scratch and then each application in turn be patched with all the hot fixes necessary that were released over the years. Then there's all the fine tuning and tweaking to make everything work. I have to have 4 different flavours of java installed and switchable due to different application requirements as an example.

Have I got a ghost of my master computer? You betcha, I also have a mirror of it booting off a SAN.

I think you have to put things into perspective, theres a whole load of difference between an apparently working computer and one thats been properly built. Sure you can slap an OS on anything and it'll work of sorts.

If you want to build something utterly stable and reliable it takes many many hours of work. One of my roles at work is to maintain our global image. The image is used by in excess of 30,000 employees globally. To get the image to where it is today took 1000's of man hours. The image is 100% dependable for every application we use, every model of hardware we have in circulation, in whatever language you prefer and works completely anomaly free regardless of what is thrown at it. This single image (scripted) will work for each and every job function across the 30,000 users and yet despite its size, bench tests faster than a vanilla XP build on any hardware you care to apply it to. The aim is to put a computer in the field and not have IT physically touch it until it is end of life after 36 months. This is not something that can be knocked up in an afternoon.

Lets look at it differently, you buy a Dell or HP PC and it comes preloaded with an OEM version of windows that has been tailored, tweaked and probably has a suite of applications added before being sysprepped ready for first use. This OEM build would also take 1000's of an hours to create, test and finalise and throughout its lifetime (18 months) it would need to have literally hundreds, possibly thousands of different bug fixes in order to work correctly for one reason or another with a whole team of people dedicated to keeping it running as it should.

Scott you say it takes 6 hours to build a PC and then you go onto say you rebuild them every six months from scratch because of all the problems.

Hmmm...I cant say I share your view on the best strategy.