Re: Hacker or paranoia?
Er, there is absolutely no need to replace the drive. Why throw away a peice of hardware that is in perfect working order?
It should be enough to reformat it, assuming boot sector virus protection is on in the BIOS. If not, delete and recreate the partition table too - however, boot sector and filesystem level viruses are now very rare as they all operate within a very narrow range of methods, and as such are easily detected by modern software.
I realise this is all rather late since the original post was a while ago.
The disappearence of norton antivirus is very possibly down to an emailed trojan or some spy/adware you mistakenly downloaded from edonkey (although in both cases you would have needed to open the attachment / download). Many trojans and soy/adware program will attempt to disable spyware and virus protection.
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