Possible virus overwritten 99 1/2% hd

[bobdavis]

 :-/
Friend with 3 month old DELL laptop got something in to computer,  even ewith all protections up.  Corrupted Outlook and other things.  reinstalled and found that the disk defrag when run to clean up found the entitre 40 gig hd was overwritten or something?? and there is 800mb left.  I would not want to wipe out everything as my friend did not do a full backup and will loose her material, (does anyone know how to make a copy of Outlook "Contacts", could not do this with the Dell cd/rw and very fustrated) anyway, can I clean up the hard drive without a reinstall of everything??  Thanks for any help. Bob

[Sean]

You can probably try running a virus scan (AVG is free) and ad-aware and spy sweeper and spy-bot to start even though it'll be hard to do all at once, probably have to do them one at a time the way it sounds. After that you should have gotten rid of you virus. Run a defrag afterwards and then backup everything. You still might want to reinstall afterwards  just to be sure but whatever floats your boat. You can try a repair with the msoft boot cd but I forget if that erases everything.

[bobdavis]

Thanks for the info but it is exactly what I did and nothing came up which is even more mysterious.  I have some freeware on a dvd that I am going to try and Ilet you and everyone know if it ok afterwards.  Thanks again.