My external hard drive appears to have a virus and now I can not delete the files off the hard drive. How can I reformat so I can eliminate the virus and clear the hard drive of all the files. I have already copied my files so I just want a clean reformat

Is the folder write protected ? If yes then unprotect it and try again.
Are there other files on the drive that you can delete ?

You can always reformat the drive and clean it that way but you will need to copy the other files from it before you want to do that.

scan your usb because your files has infected with viruses, go to start in your PC look for cmd command type cmd you will drive D: change to your drive just type E: or F: and type dir to see all files. or reformat to remove virus save your files to other drive.

can you see the External HD on the My Computer? and when you right click to open or double click won't open? but if you can open the external HD using the drop down tool at the my computer, then the problem is virus. You should update your anti-virus then scan it to delete those virus, and if you do not have any important files, i guess its much better to reformat the drive.

please let me know your further query.

regards,
toeped

Click "Safely Remove Hardware" in your tooltray (one of those little icons on the lower right
of your screen across from the START button - its a green arrow over a PC board). That'll
remove it from the system, then re-attach it (Windows Plug-n-Play will find it and re-mount
the drive).
Then, deep-scan your anti-virus software on your entire system - the possible cause of loss
of directory structure on your external HDD.
Then, run CHKDSK on your Seagate External Hard drive - to make the directory structure sane again.
How-to-do-this: START> Run > (type in) chkdsk
Then, download (free) "Recuva" software from http://www.piriform.com to recover anything lost in
making your external HDD's directory/file structure sane again.
Run Recuva in this mode:
Recuva > Options (button) > Actions (tab) > Scan for non-deleted files (for recovery from damaged or
reformatted disks)

Your disk is formatted using FAT32 file system. FAT32 has a maximum single file size of 4GB. Reformat your drive using NTFS file system to enable file saving larger than 4GB.

To reformat the drive:
-insert external drive
- open "My Computer", point your mouse over the drive letter of your external drive, right-click and select "Format". Select NTFS from drop-down menu under "File System".
-click "Start" button

Please note that all data will be deleted so please backup your files before formatting the drive.

Your system has suffered an unrecoverable error. Either vital operating system files have been corrupted, deleted or overwritten or your hard drive has failed. I suggest reformatting the drive and reloading the operating system from scratch. This can also be cause by some virus infections currently in the wild ( viruses that are currently circulating the internet) so make sure you boot from a system disk and reformat the drive or drives from this boot disk. Sorry but you have very few chances of a successful recovery from this without reinstalling your operating system.

It seems that you will lose your files. These file already
infected with virus, and corrupted it. There's no other
way but to reformat your smartdisk.

Silakan baca di >sini<
Desi Vibes

"boot.com" is a virus which attacks the hard drives & the hard drives could not be opened by double clicking. In hard drives after enabling viewing hidden file u can see some "autorun" file & a file named "boot.com" which cannot be removed just by deleting.

Here’s the REAL way to clean this off your system. You should do these steps after a fresh reboot in safe mode.
1) Navigate to the problem drive(s) via the Explore option.
2) Click on TOOLS -> FOLDER OPTIONS
3) Click the button which says ‘Show hidden files and folders.
4) UNCHECK the following boxes:
Hide extensions for known file types
Hide protected operrating system files
5) Find and delete the autorun.ini file and the resycled folder on the root directory of all affected drives.
6) Check “c:\windows\system32\dllcache” for boot.com file and delete it if present.
7) Check “c:\windows\prefetch” for boot.com file and delete if present.
8) Delete all files from c:\windows\temp
(Some files may not delete, that’s ok, they’re in use by the system and not virus files.)
9) Delete all files from c:\Documents and Settings\[USER PROFILE]\Local Settings\Temp
(Again, a couple files may not delete, don’t worry.)
10) Run Regedit
11) Make sure you are at the very first entry of the registry hive. (My Computer should be hilighted) then click EDIT -> FIND
12) Search for “boot.com”. If it finds an entry, delete it. Keep hitting F3 until you’ve deleted all instances of boot.com in the entire registry.
13) Scroll the left column back up to the top and hilight the My Computer again at the top of the registry hive.
14) Click Edit -> Find again and search for ‘resycled’ and repeat as in step 13, deleting the entries as it finds them.
15) Close registry editor and try opening the infected drives. They should work now.
Worked for me at least.

If you have not written anything to the disk since you accidentally formatted it I can recover all your files for you. If you wrote any files to it some of the files will be ruined. I have FBI forensic software that can do what you need and more. Rate this fixya and post an e-mail address and I will get the software to you.
George