repair old drive

Hi, I'm a new member. I hope I've picked the right forum to post this. Please let me know if I should be in another one.
I've used spywareblaster and spyguard and found these forums through using them. I have some problems that I've had a hard time trying to work on. My system is 4 years old. It worked pretty well and I'd been fairly agressive about protection but there were things here and there, til last Nov it all got worse and worse over a couple of weeks. I took the HD out of the box then, end of November, and it's on the table, not connected to anything. I put in another HD and put my restore disc on it and it works ok. I had saved data and so on but want to clean and re-use the old drive, (I have my reasons) without wiping and reinstalling if possible so I have some questions. Some specs.
Old drive;
98se, all updates and patches, Zone Alarm, Norton, spywareblaster, spybot, all were up to date except Norton antivirus which had expired a month before my problems started.
New drive;
98se updates, ZA, Spywareblaster, spyguard, Adaware, AVG antivirus, all up to date.

I was looking at different antivirus at that time and had tried a sample of Kaspersky but I didn't run it correctly and ran it with Norton running, and the two butted heads I guess I'd describe it as, and I suspect that something that was in quarantine in Norton got out when Kaspersky tried to get into the quarantine files. Does this make sense? The system locked up a couple of times and I removed Kaspersky. It seemed that things went downhill from there. Symptoms are, something kept trying to connect to the internet by bringing up a dialup box, but a different one than the one that has always been the one I use. Some other things began to occur such as multiple listing of modems and network adapters. Tcp/ip began to act oddly. This dialup box began appearing at startup, and then at any attempt to use Norton, and ultimately any attempt to use most any program at all. Norton was unable to delete or quarantine a file I suspected was involved, even in safe mode.

New drive seems to be ok. I've looked at a lot of sites for info and one approach I've seen is to mount the old drive as a slave and scan it from the new drive, with the AVG and other anti-malware. I have read a page on here somewhere about doing things in a specific order using some programs such as Stinger and vx2 cleaner etc, and I will do that also. I just want to know if doing it this way is a good idea. I think that's what I want to try but want to know how to go about it, specifically should I leave the Norton alone or should I disable or remove Norton first. If so, then should I mount that drive as a master, remove Norton, then remount as a slave for the scan? Is there anything else that I should do, such as system restore to get back to a few days before things got really bad and then scan.
Is there some danger that I can infect the new drive from the old one, mounting this way?
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Thanks for any comments.

 

Hi Jerryc, welcome to Wilders, just mount your old drive as a "Slave" and then run scans with your security software and that's all you will need to do.

Cheers