boot virus on new hardrive

A friend has brought me their pc with a new hardrive they attempted to format, but managed to infect it with a NYB boot virus. I have used the fdisk utility before and have set DOS partitions and installed DOS operating systems before. I cannot manage to get past the warning stating "remove disk now to avoid infection of boot virus. Also, which version of DOS should I try to install should I resolve the virus problem. Where can I download the complete installation disks for DOS? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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Originally Posted by Blondeheat

A friend has brought me their pc with a new hardrive they attempted to format, but managed to infect it with a NYB boot virus. I have used the fdisk utility before and have set DOS partitions and installed DOS operating systems before. I cannot manage to get past the warning stating "remove disk now to avoid infection of boot virus.

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Some CMOS/BIOS Setups include a Boot Sector Anti-Virus. If yours has this feature, it needs to be Disabled before installing any Operating System, (because the Operating System must create a new Boot Sector on the hard drive in order to be able to boot from it).

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Originally Posted by Blondeheat

Also, which version of DOS should I try to install should I resolve the virus problem. Where can I download the complete installation disks for DOS?

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MS-DOS is a copyright-protected, commercial product from Microsoft. As such, it is illegal to "download" and/or "make available for download" (or any other form of illegal copy/transfer).

Why do you want to install MS-DOS? It's next to useless for doing most anything on today's PCs.

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Why do you want to install MS-DOS? It's next to useless for doing most anything on today's PCs.

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Ouch!

http://www.freedos.org/

Although MS-DOS is fast and small, many of its features are severely limited and restrictive on today's PCs. A few of the major problems are:

• MS-DOS is not a multitasking Operating System.
  
  
• MS-DOS cannot access files on FAT32 or NTFS partitions.
  
  
• The MS-DOS file allocation table (FAT[16]) file system can support only 2 GB per partition. (And the maximum number of partitions that MS-DOS can use is 24: Drive C: through Drive Z:).
  
  
• The MS-DOS 8.3 file name standard describes file and folder names that contain a maximum of eight characters and an optional extension with a maximum of three characters. The MS-DOS 8.3 file name standard does not allow extended characters (such as commas or spaces). (In Windows, long file names can include up to 250 characters, and can include extended characters such as commas or spaces). Also, MS-DOS, by default, converts all the characters in file names and directory names to uppercase characters.

Other minor problems that come to mind:

• If you access a network drive that has more than 2 gigabytes (GB) of disk space, the MS-DOS "DIR" command reports zero bytes free. This problem occurs because the upper limit for MS-DOS reporting disk space free is 2 GB. This limitation occurs because MS-DOS stores the size of a file as a 31-bit number.
  
  
• PATH and SET limitations|problems
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q97595/
  
  
• Pipe (|) after IF EXIST fails and results in FAT corruption
  http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=74464
  
  
• More Microsoft-acknowleged but still unresolved problems in MS-DOS:
  http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...=&start=0&sa=N

Thanks for the replies. How else do you format a new hardrive without DOS?

Depends on the Operating System that's going to be installed.

How to install or upgrade to Windows XP
(See the "Install Windows XP to a new hard disk" section)
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=316941

How to partition and format a hard disk in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348