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I haven't looked at ad malware for many years, but when I did, it infected the MBR, so reinstalling Windows alone wouldn't remove it. I had to rebuild the MBR. I definitely recommend doing any live testing in a VM on a dedicated testing device. Who knows what sneakier persistence techniques are out there now?

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>I haven't looked at ad malware for many years, but when I did, it infected the MBR, so reinstalling Windows alone wouldn't remove it.

In this case, wouldn't the infection go away by formatting the disk?

Strictly speaking (disks), yes, but people often say "disk" and format partitions instead.

As the partition table and the MBR/"EFI system partition" exist outside of the realm of normal partitions, formatting normal partitions doesn't help in this case.

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