69.6 megs used on disk partition after formating..

Greetings,

My home system recently crashed and burned. It was heavily infected with viruses and other nasty digital critters. I preformed a full format of the 2 infected drives and re-installed winxp pro sp1.

Then I formatted the non-os drive again for good measure.
It reports that out of the 20.6 gigs free, 69.6 megs of disk space is being used.

There are only 2 objects I can see on the drive, the Recycler folder and System Volume Info folder.

The Recylcer is using 1 kb in 1 file, the Sys Vol Info folder is using 0 kb


I looked at the drive with the defragmentation tool (kinda random I know, but I have no utils installed yet!) and it reports 4 fragmented files on the disk and 1 fragmented folder.

What's going on here exactly? I haven't put anything into the drive, yet 70 megs are being used up, and not by any files I can see. And some of these phantom files are fragmented.

Am I likely to still be infected? What viruses have an MO like this?

well just use an online virus scan when you get the internet up for it and see if anything comes up. if something comes up remove the virus and reformat agian. I dont think u have anything to worry about with viruses cause you did reformat. Check and see if there are any hidden files on the drive. then just scan with http://housecall.trendmicro.com/houseca ... t_corp.asp and if nothing comes up then theres nothing to worry about and you can again

File System takes of space too. Depending if it is fat32, fat16, NTFS the size the file system is varies.

/agree with SecureITGroup. I would not be supprised to see this amount of space used up on a new drive.

S

Hmm thanks.

Drive comes up completely clean on all scans I've subjected it to, but then again it was coming up clean before I decided to format. Folders with .exes were installing themselves randomly about. Those never triggered any of the virus scanners I was using (McAfee, Pardus, Trojan Hunter, 2 online scanners, and some other smaller specific cleaners, as well as Adaware and Spybot).

FIle format is NTFS. I kinda figured if it was anything legit, it would have been the file system. But 70 megs seemed excessive. And then the disk defrag came up with 4 fragmentsed files and a fragmented folder when the drive was freshly formated and was supposed to be empty...

I guess I'll go ahead and start re-installing my apps then. Thanks for the input!

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The NTFS fiel system is much more boigger than the FAT32 or even the FAT16/FAT. The file system is like a fileing cabnet the more coplex it is the heaver it will be.

Normally after a format the drives contain file system info as well as, depending on the type of format stat-up files, obviously if the files aren't shown then they are just file system files which are always hidden, one question though does the size of these files depend on the size of the disk because surely if the HDD was 40MB (they exist) then there would be no room for progs at all!