I own two hard drives. One is the primary hard drive for operating system, drivers, standard programs, etc. Other is the secondary drive that strictly has all my games on it (and will have iTunes once I reinstall it there).

I reformatted my primary hard drive to get rid of a virus/malware/etc. As I did it, I did not have the secondary hard drive connected. It is still not connected as we speak.

1) Is there a chance that this virus/malware is also on the secondary hard drive? If so, am I able to connect the hard drive and immediately do a virus scan/spyware scan on the hard drive to remove/fix this?

2) If everything is fine with the second hard drive, I connect it. Do I have to reinstall the games on the hard drive? How do I get these games to come up in the Start menu, the control panel for adding/removing programs, and the registry edit thing? Or does all this happen automatically?

Thanks in advance!

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1) Yes. Install/Update your antivirus on your primary drive, disconnect from the network, install your old drive, and do nothing but scan it before you pull any files off.

2) You will likely have to reinstall any games which are not sandbox (ie, most any game on Windows) just to put the appropriate DLLs where they belong. Fortunately, when you tell it where the game is installed, most games will recognize they're already there and just do a scan. Only a few MMORPGs I've played in the past few years did not do so. FFXI and EVE come to mind.

So when a person reinstalls Everquest, do they have to reinstall all 35 expansions?

They usually patch all at the same time, but yes!

OK I went into my Everquest file folder on my second hard drive, made a shortcut to the desktop. Can start and run Everquest completely fine, no issues. In fact, it loads up a ton faster after the re-format. However...

I did not re-install the game. It does not come up on Start menu, nor does it come up on Control Panel on Add/Remove programs. It seems as if my computer/registry/etc does not know that the game is there. But as I mentioned, I can play the game perfectly fine.

Should I even bother with the registery DLL and stuff like that? Should I worry that my computer does not recognize it and put it in the Start menu? Or is all of this completely fine and I can continue to play with no issues?

PS- If I do want to re-install a game (say, Civ 4 w/expansions) but it is not on my Control Panel or Start menu... can I just delete the folder and then re-install to the same drive? Or is there a more appropriate way of doing this...

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EQ keeps all its files in its directory so just making a shortcut like you did will work fine.

When you run uninstall it deletes the Games directory, cleans the registry and removes any DLLs that were stored elsewhere, usually in Win/system.

When you replaced your Hard Drive the Registry and DLLs were removed so just deleting the Civ directory then reinstalling will work fine.

No

You can copy a directory over and just run eqgame.exe or whatever and it will work... Ive created DVD's for people who left eq and uninstalled it previously, it works just fine with a copy.

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Yes, there's a chance the virus (if there was one) infected your secondary drive before any of your software detected it. No, of course it's not safe to connect it to your just-reformatted machine to scan it.

If you reinstalled your operating system, the registry entries for your installed programs are largely borked anyway. The quick and dirty method is described above, and might even work, but if you want to be sure of the integrity of your data, you'll want to install all of that again anyway. That removes the necessity of even checking the second drive; format it flat and then (only then) connect it to something you care about.

You'll only be offline for like two days, and then you can go about making RotA top guild on Stormhammer again. :b