Reinstalled Windows Any short cuts??? or help

[curtains]

Hey I'm new to this forum.. so anyways..

Hey i recently(few hours ago) had my computer attacked with vurises to a unfixable(windows still usable jst not fixable(to like origional)) point jst buncha vurises that keep reproducing themselfs, so i decide to reinstall windows on a different harddrive I was woundering if there are any short cuts to getting back other software configerations,there on the other harddrive(meaning i havent deleted them)I dont want to have to reinstall everything as that will be a big hassle as i have like a billion programs i need i had saved an regestry file from a while ago if that will help(the regestry file is good) i tryed googleing it and nothing that could help .. and whats this ghosting thing??? oh and does anyone know how to uninstall my old window because it comes up with the duel booting now which is annoying??

thanks if anyone can fix any of my problems would help alot... cheers

 

[PC eye]

For one when going to install Windows on the second drive it added the first drive into the new boot record. If you are running XP you would have to edit the boot.ini file with NotePad, WordPad, or another text editer to remove the line referring to the old drive.

As far as retrieving anything off of the old hard drive before it is free of viruses, spywares, adwares, or whatever else would be found there you would only spread those to the new drive. Ghosting is commonly known as cloning a drive by creating an image of one drive to copy onto another one. You would simply be copying the infections on the first drive to another one in your case.

Unless you can clean the first drive of any infection there you might as well assume the drive is contaminated and it would have to be wiped clean. That would mean the loss of all data and files you wanted to keep. You need to run some antivirus and other types of utilities to sweep the drive before trying to backup anything off of it.