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I read this thread:

How can I remove malicious spyware, malware, adware, viruses, trojans or rootkits from my PC?

Excellent write ups and thank you to everyone who posted something I learned! I was especially looking at the post by Joel Coehoorn

Will connecting empty flash drive to infected computer to download Windows Installation Media be a bad idea? How do I circumvent this without buying some external storage with another copy of Windows?

Something I don't understand is even if I ideally directly bought from Microsoft a flash drive with the installation media on it, at what point do I connect it to infected PC?

I know the PC will need to boot from USB before operating system starts up but is that not still dangerous?

I have also made sure to retrieve the Windows product key from my infected PC. I understand I can only ask one question so I try to keep within same line of idea

Malwary
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1 Answers1

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If your this concern about it, go to another computer and download it onto a fresh USB thumb drive. Go to a friends house, library, maybe work, or etc and download a copy from there.

If you want to be really careful, buy an SSD and remove your old hard drive and set it aside. Now is the perfect time to upgrade to an SSD. If you need to retrieve the license key you can plug the old hard drive back in, and swap back the ssd.

So you have:

  1. fresh USB drive
  2. new ssd

The only place for a virus to hide is in the bios, or firmware. You could re-download the BIOS from whoever made your motherboard and reflash it.

Firmware your basically stuck unless you can download it, and reflash it.

However, BIOS and firmware viruses are still relatively uncommon. I would not get overly stressed about them.

cybernard
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