It's been a long time but It finally happened, I've been compromised.
Like an idiot I reused passwords and they got into most of my accounts. I've changed 300 different passwords and recovered all except one account, my Facebook, which I'm being told is unlikely I'll ever get into again.
This is probably from a data breach, I'm in a few, however, I still want to do a wipe of my PC, but it's been a few years and I don't remember the best practices.
This is a long time coming though because as well as simply possibly being compromised my PC has been experiencing a myriad of errors and annoyances, such as random entire system stutters, apps crashing out of nowhere and general performance slowdown.
Luckily I've got about 7 drives all holding various things, but the entire OS is on the tiny NVME C drive, as well as program installations. IIRC I can factory reset without losing data on the other drives but this one will probably be wiped yes? Is this enough for security though? I would imagine most malicious files would be completely removed by reinstalling the OS but I want to make sure no other avenues exist.
Also what is best practices this day and age to do a clean reset? Thanks guys
Are those seven separate physical drives?
A reset shouldn't affect them, but if you want to be sure, first you should have backups, like with a cloud provider. For example, my data is replicated in 3 places at home (to protect against drive failure and me being a dumbass), and one online backup.
If it were me, I'd make sure I had a backup, then I'd disconnect those drives just to be sure. Software can't delete a drive that's not connected.
Then I'd do the reset, setup the machine, and then reconnect the drives.
Yes they're physical, and I'm not worried about accidentally deleting them, but I'm just checking to make sure there's not some sort of virus that can jump to non system drives or something, also, some of them do have program data in them, I should just delete all of those right? I can only imagine it causing problems on the reinstalls
Ignoring the virus part, for the sake of conversion.
The programs on secondary drives might be okay. I've found some programs will survive a "system swap", and others won't. Part of it depepeds if they have any dependaccies that are also installed during installation (such as one of the dozens of "microsoft visual code" versions that always end up on an old system).
Another factor my be a programs reliance on the registry. A clean install would wipe that, so the program woundn't have the necessary data.
There's also user appdata folders, a program might survive, but if it was storing user data there, you loose what ever config you might have had.
You'll also have to manually re-add them to the start menu folder, windows doesn't scan or anything like that, the start menu is just a folder of shortcuts added during a program's install.