Tezzo's Technology Blog

"Q: I have heard of people throwing out their hard drives because of virus infections. Why not zap the hard drive with an electromagnetic videotape bulk eraser, then format and reload the operating system? Works for me....— Ann A: It's never reasonable to throw out a drive because of a virus infestation. If you're frustrated enough to wipe everything and start fresh, you can do so without any special hardware. A product like the free DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) will overwrite the entire disk multiple times, wiping out all data to military standards. You create a floppy disk or CD of DBAN on a clean system and boot the to-be-wiped system from it. DBAN then thoroughly wipes the drive's data. A different problem arises when the drive is actually nonfunctional. Your data is still on it, and conceivably a forensics expert could recover it. If the data is sensitive enough for this to be a worry, you can solve your problem the old-fashioned way: Take the drive out to the...

If you're running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or even Service Pack 3, what happens if you have to perform a system recovery using your original XP CD? Hassles, that's what. Reader Ralph recently experienced that exact scenario, resulting in an awful lot of Windows Updating after the installation. That's because the old CD doesn't have all the patches and updates you've downloaded over the years. It could take hours or even days to re-download and reinstall all that extra stuff, during which time your PC is more vulnerable to viruses and outside attacks. (A lot of those patches tackle security issues.) Consequently, Ralph wanted to know if there was some way to back up the Windows Service Packs so he wouldn't be in the same boat next time. There is--you can download the Service Packs as standalone installers directly from Microsoft ( here's SP3 , for example)--but I propose a different solution: slipstreaming. Slipstreaming is the proces...