Whenever I format the drive it tells me that it has space used as you can see. The amount of space varies by filesystem it is the same drive under different filesystems. This does not only happen with this hard drive but with all of the drives I own.
Data used and reserved for file structures with various File Systems use disk space.
So what I did today was to install windows XP and look for rootkits via a utility called TDSSKiller. To my surprise It found over 174 rootkits but I knew something was up from the start..
Only way I can see that happening is with a pirated install of XP. (Or, if the install was actually a repair install or upgrade install of an existing infected XP installation)
The hole gets deeper tough when I attempt to run the program DBAN I cant use it. It tells me that the Hard disks might contain bad sectors yet in on other computer I can use the software. One possibility that I am getting that error might be hardware related issues but by any chance can a motherboard become infected?
bad sectors can be responsible for false flaggings of rootkits, based on how a lot of them work (which is typically to inspect the disk at a lower level than the API functions that a rootkit would circumvent). Errors are sometimes flagged as rootkits. This is a sensible approach because the assumption on the software side is that hardware is working properly, so if something goes wrong, it assumes there is some other piece of software getting in the way. DBAN isn't designed to wipe disks with bad sectors. You could try an alternative tool like MHDD or HDDErase. Another common tool is Active@Kill disk, which comes in a free version that can be used.
What I will attempt is to run DBAN once again but am expecting the same result since Ive done it before I installed windows XP and found the rootkits.
Rootkits are low level drivers installed into the operating System, usually used to facilitate the infection of the machine by hiding those new files from your standard OS tools. It quite literally cannot exist separate from the OS. A fresh install of Windows- or any OS, for that matter, quite literally cannot be infected in this way- unless the install is done using a pirated Disc, which can often come with loads of "goodies" in the form of malware and rootkits.
Some could argue that as part of a MBR or other low level code it could, but the XP install rewrites the MBR (as does GRUB install, to my recollection) so that isn't a place it would survive.
Theoretically it is possible for a virus to infect a BIOS, however, the problem here is that a Jumper would almost always have to be moved on the motherboard, and it would have to be built to specifically target that exact Motherboard model. Since malware authors aim to infect as many machines as possible, this simply isn't economical from that perspective.
