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[612DwarfAvenue]

That's why it's a good idea to do regular virus scans.

And stay away from the porn and warez!

[nenjin]

If you don't really know what you're doing to begin with, and you're prevented from accessing all the tools and knowledge the internet can offer, I'd personally just reformat and treat it as a lesson learned. You can spend a long time chasing down virii and never catch it all. If you're that infected, just start from square 1 and remember how much you hate reformatting when you're tempted to link surf. You don't sound like you're sitting on tons of important data, and by important, I mean work data.

[Vibhor]

You see, I would format my hard disk if I could but apparently the windows fail to format them for some weird reason. Oh, and I use my computer to play games.

[nenjin]

What does it do? Do you have the original installation disks for the OS, or the crappy versions that ship with pre-built computers?

[ChairmanPoo]

I installed linux after I had an incident simmilar to the OPs. I had spent months having regular slowdowns which were somewhat fixed after a sysrestore. That was annoying enough. Then I got riddled with Virut, and lost data in the cleanup (ended up having to format because even AVG's virut remover was unable to clean all files). That summer installed ubuntu. I switched computers in February, and now dual boot (the only reason I dual boot instead of running just ubuntu is that there are many games that simply don't run as well in Wine as in Windows. Otherwise I do all my "serious" stuff -and some games that run well in linux, like DF- in ubuntu)

[Vibhor]

What does it do? Do you have the original installation disks for the OS, or the crappy versions that ship with pre-built computers?

Original OS installation disk(though XP one was a crappy version)
After wasting over 8 hours in scanning and removing all the files in the drive I use, the sites are working again and all the virus is gone.

[Vibhor]

Okay now I have a bigger problem.
You see, I installed vista on a different partition because the previous one didn't have enough space. Now the problem starts from here.
The previous partition in which XP was installed is infected with virus and it seems that it also has some of the previous files of XP as the boot screen of the OS ask which OS to open while giving the choice of Windows vista and "An Earlier version of windows". As everyone would know that the basic solution would be to format the drive but vista refuses to format the drive and "Securom" is obstructing a direct delete. I cannot even delete the partition. The only solution would be to scan and delete the infected files but those are over 1500 and it would take weeks to clear all of them.
Solution plox?

[ChairmanPoo]

boot into linux (without installing it if you dont want to, just booting) and remove the partition using gparted?

[Vibhor]

boot into linux (without installing it if you dont want to, just booting) and remove the partition using gparted?

And how do I do that?
I am no computer whiz. I don't know shit about Operating systems.

[Starver]

Easiest way might be to find a Linux magazine in the local newsagents/supermarket promising a "Live CD" (or DVD, assuming you're not stuck with a CD-type optical drive) on the cover or inside.  Stick it in, boot up on it (acccept defaults, assuming you avoid any actual installation options, although as you're starting from scratch that wouldn't hurt either ) and although it will change slightly between distros, find the "terminal" (command prompt, might be called "kterm" or something else with "term" in it) in whatever Start-Menu equivalent it has (might be under "System") and type "gparted" and enter.  You then get something that's a GUI partition deleter/mover/creator/resizer/reformatter that you should be able to handle with a few clicks in the obvious places.  (YMMV, but I really don't think you'll have difficulty at that stage.)

Most distros will have gparted (and there's a distro that's essentially "boot direct to gparted", but I don't know if you're comfortable creating your own bootable CDs).  If it doesn't appear to exist, there are less graphical options that do the same job (sfdisk, cfdisk) one or both of which are sure to exist on any distro not ridiculously locked-down, but are terminal/command-line based and a bit more awkward. They do have internal and external help information you can refer to, of course, but we'll cross that bridge if you get to it, I think.

I don't know if you also need to do a FIXMBR-type operation on your disk, BTW, but let's leave that till later if the above doesn't sort everything out.

[Vibhor]

Sadly finding any magazine or even a disk of linux in the place I live is like looking for the holy grail.

[ChairmanPoo]

download and burn one

[Vibhor]

Okay I am back with another problem. I am pretty sure you peeps would be getting annoyed by now.
So here goes.
It seems that the drive I wanted to format is the drive that stores the bootmgr which means it handles the booting which could be the reason that it isn't getting formatted.
So what I ask now is how could I switch the booting task to the disk that holds windows vista files instead of this one. Please, any instructions should be given as if teaching a baby. Caveman speak would be appreciated.

[Starver]

Right, I see how that'd be a problem. Can't (easily, this is a slow connection) wander back through the thread history to see if you'd said you had a Windows CD/DVD (but I think you did), but you should be able to boot up onto this, go into the (R)escue mode and use FDISK from there (or equivalent, and also FIXMBR, as you might not have the command FDISK in order to "FDISK /FIXMBR" with, as I've gotten sudden amnesia about which versions of Windows give what tools through which recovery modes... but I know they were edging away from tried-and-tested DOS-type tools in a DOS-like prompt to some weird GUI equivalent that confuses the hell out of me, and I'm sometimes very glad I've still got a working DOS 6.22 boot disk) to remove all partitions (and sort the boot sector out), or indeed just go with the "Install Windows" option, and at the point where it asks where to install it first remove the partition then let it install upon the "unused space".

If I'm completely wrong about you being able to do that, or in completely the wrong part of the support process, I might as well point you towards http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php (also options for bootable USB), in the hope that you can burn this and use it accordingly.

(edit: I know you asked for caveman speak, but I think you can handle the above.  The big problem being that it's a flow of instructions intertwined with general comments, but you should be able to separate the two.

[612DwarfAvenue]

and "Securom" is obstructing a direct delete.

I HNNNG'd at that part. That's stupid that it would obstruct like that.