Yes Oso the can and If you boot off the infected HDD, the virus will be resident and rewrite itself to the MBR anytime someone else writes the MBR.

To clean up, you need to boot off a known clean, write protected floppy disk and do the fdisk and format /u from there. Or better yet, use a sector level utility that wipes the drive by writing meaningless stuff to each sector.
if you wanted to be absolutely sure of not getting reinfected is to debug the MBR then debug the partitions (given that nothing was saved to the BIOS). Reinstall all programs off of the CD's and don't reinstall any saved data.
here is a link for the utility to learn more....http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive_overview.php

man its too early for spelling but what i was trying to say is a virus can live through a format