Can a virus survive reformat in the MediaDirect partition?

I have a dell XPS m1530, and because I am pretty sure I had a virus that my antivirus software could not pick up I reinstalled Vista.

I ended up reformatting the partition it was on before installing over, I also reformatted the recovery partition. But, apparently XPS system comes with a MediaDirect partition that I was unable to reformat (the windows set up did not let me do this).

I am wondering now if it's possible for the virus to have lived through the reformat in the MediaDirect partition. If so, how can I reformat that partition?

 

If it is specifically aware of MediaDirect and it's function, I suppose it probably could. It's very unlikely though.

To delete it, you'll need to use the diskpart command in Windows.

 

I did reinstall MediaDirect after I reinstalled Vista, it doesn't seem to have any files from before the reinstall. Hmm... Do you think it means the virus could not have made it?

 

A virus COULD survive there if it were written specifically to do that. However, the energy and time it would take to write a virus to do that would not be worth the effort compared to, say, exerting the energy for a new MAC virus or something like that.

So the answer is "possible but highly unlikely" that a virus would live an survive on the MediaDirect partition.

 

You might want to try and scan for any MBR viruses on the system. It is highly unlikely that a virus would be specifically written to attack MediaDirect, but MBR viruses have been around for a LONG time.

 

"Windows won't let me do that"
-- Hang on there, Did you actually say that ?