If you had windows 8/8.1 originally the key is in the BIOS, and won't be erased. If it is a windows 7 key you can use showkey to retrieve it. Solved Showkey - Windows 10 Forums . Since you had windows 10 installed, it will automatically activate again, just click on "skip" where it asks for a key during installation.
Thanks for the solution mate, it will help me. Over the night, I will boot from my clean Windows 10 Media which was created before I was infected and run the lines. You helped me a lot. If this works, I will mark it as a answer. When will I respond? I will respond at around 4:30PM tomorrow as I have to go to School. As in my experience, the infection has gone worse. Someone now has access to talk to me with his Mic! I think that it is a Trojan. This must be some high level infection. But now it will be erased from my Hard Drive.
Not sure why you would be needing a secure wipe. If its just a virus that is just in the OS then just deleting all the partitions and reinstalling Windows would be enough. No point in doing a wipe that takes several hours to complete and shortens the life of the drive if you have an SSD. If you were transferring ownership of the computer then I could understand that.
I do not have a SSD. I am doing a full on wipe as I have tried reinstalling the OS with erasing all disk partitions in the Custom option but it seemed to fail. Does this Diskpart erasure method write zeros, if it does, shouldn't it use disk space for storing all of those zeros on the hard drive or do the zeros get erased when Windows is installing? Thanks, I'm going to do some more research about this because I still feel insecure. XD. Thanks EVERYONE so much for smashing that reply button.
MSM
Ehh, after doing some research I figured out that Diskpart does not erase Hidden Partitions, it only erases Normal Partitions and Boot Sectors, the same with Parted Magic. Killdisk, I couldn't find anything so back to square one, any other tools?
Zeros are just empty space, on HDD it's non magnetized particle and on SSD just open transistor so zeros are not actually written. To overwrite, a real value has to be written, most write just random data so there's no pattern to decipher. There's another thing, low level formatting that that completely changes disk structure so nothing is recognizable any more. Disk has to be partitioned and formatted from scratch after.
Check out this article on Technet. DiskPart Command-Line Options . This is the important part:
Hope this helps.
Thanks John and Count. John, should I use the command "clean" or should I use "clean all" to wipe the whole HDD, including the Hidden Partitions. By the way, I have a GPT Disk which is 700GB (570GB are not being used on the C:).
Thanks,
MSM
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