I have been infected after visiting malicious website

Question

I looked for an address in Ethiopia through Google.

I got a red screen to say I have been infected with a virus and to call a windows number 1-844 (the rest I lost) ....  meantime hundreds of files were downloading. I did not click anything on any download or Google or the virus warning page.

My laptop (Lenovo) totally locked and crashed. 

I eventually got it going after huge delays and ran some kind of check that came up. All was clear.

I then ran Defender/AVG/Norton/Malwarebytes/AdCleaner and all said I was clean. I deleted 2,400 files in downloads without opening any. 

The laptop was still compromised.

I then decided to recover my HDD back to factory status. This was successful.

Still...it now takes 5 minutes to get to the login screen and I have to turn off anf turn on just to get to this screen.

Is my HDD crashed/thrashed...should I replace it? Can I transfer my Windows 7 (original MS product) to the new HDD? 

What to do, please? 

[Original Title: Bad!]

Answer 1

Not sure why it was funneled to me if it's Windows 7, but I will be glad to help you all the same.

If you want to transfer to a new hard drive, you can do this with an imaging app like macrium but it will most likely transfer the problems with it.

You'd be better off doing the clean install in this tutorial for the best possible clean reinstall of Windows 7 which includes the media and everything else needed. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/for...

Answer 2

Thank you Rob...as I said to Greg I am so reluctant to totally wipe my HDD which does have my Win 7 OS!