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Once I read that the Windows 7 installation disc could clean an infected MBR. I also found an article that suggested one tool to scan the MBR for viruses. And I also read that one MBR virus could prevent the loaded OS from writing to the MBR, but it could fool it in believing that the writing was successful.

  1. Does MS Security Essentials scans the MBR?
  2. Should I trust Geekstogo's MBRCheck.exe?
  3. What tools can help me to scan an clean my MBR?
  4. Will a Windows reinstall clean my MBR?
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2 Answers

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  1. Nothing can, I dont think
  2. Yes, to the extent its not a virus or anything, I don't know how helpful it will be.
  3. See here for how to rewrite your MBR.
  4. Bootstrapp from a read-only installation disc into the recovery console and use bootsect. Thank you @JdeBP
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In that thread a guy found a MBR rootkit using gmer.net – Jader Dias Jul 26 '11 at 12:22
He found what could be a rootkit. It's behavior matched that of one, but in theory, it could have been a bad driver or something. – soandos Jul 26 '11 at 12:23
I have one additional question, see my edit in the OP. – Jader Dias Jul 26 '11 at 12:23
a bad driver that writes to the MBR? It's very suspicious... – Jader Dias Jul 26 '11 at 12:24
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First: One doesn't low-level format modern (ATA and SCSI) hard discs. Second: One doesn't need a format to make sure. One can quite happily make sure by bootstrapping from a read-only installation disc into the recovery console and using bootsect. – JdeBP Jul 26 '11 at 15:12
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up vote 2 down vote

I literally just finished scanning my brother's hard drive (connected via a USB hard drive dock) to my Windows 7 machine, and Microsoft Security Essentials picked up an MBR virus. MSE should be able to detect the problem if there is a virus (run chkdsk /R if you don't find one, could be corrupted sectors on the disk).

If the MBR or boot sector is corrupted, you can use TestDisk to repair/overwrite them (it can even find corrupted or missing partitions and rewrite the partition table!). Alternatively, you can also use TestDisk to simply recover the files (if you just want to format and start from scratch).

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