Li'l Abner wrote:

>"siljaline" <spam@uce.gov> wrote in news:i9673q$ecg$1@news.eternal-
>september.org:
>
>> http://www.dban.org/
>
>I didn't have to get *that* violent! There was a recovery partion. I put it
>back to the original factory image, got rid of Norton, got all the Windows
>updates, installed Avira, copied his documents back (they were clean), and
>the owner has picked it up.

So what are you going to do if the recovery partition had a
modification to load a rootkit and the rootkit loads malware from the
infected disk space that was not wiped when you reinstalled? At this
point you cannot claim with certainty that they are not still
infected.