UncleJoe
Well-known member
This tip for repairing an infected computer is well known among IT geeks but I have found that many computer users have no knowledge of it so I thought I would share. Those among us that work in IT already know of this and some will chime in with other ideas.
A buddy of mine runs a PC repair business, 90% of his business is cleaning PC's of viruses and malware. Here is a tip you can use to fix your pc if it becomes infected.
Some of the new and nasty viruses embed themselves deep inside the operating system and use that operating system to hide themselves from virus scanners. The technique many pros used for years was to remove the infected drive from the machine and attach it to a clean machine as just another drive. When they boot the clean machine the infected drive just shows up as another drive and then the operating system on that drive is not in use and thus it can not act as a hiding place for the virus. A virus or malware scan is then initiated from the clean machine and the virus or malware is cleaned up.
Not everyone has a clean PC available and the process of opening the case and removing the hard drive is time consuming so this is where the geeks of the worked have figured out a better way.
The goal is to take the operating system on the C drive out of the picture so what we do is create a bootable CD with an operating system on it and some anti virus software on it. When you boot to the new CD you are running on the operating system that is on the CD and taking the OS on the C drive out of the picture.
This concept has been around in the geek world for a long time and one of the many pioneers was The Ulitimate Boot CD for Windows, UBCD4W which you can google if you want. The UBCD4W has a ton of free tools and may be too advanced for the casual user. However there are some fantastic tools out there that are free and easy to use.
Many of the Antivirus software manufactures have created rescue CD's. The popular AVG antivirus software has a pretty good tool that has worked well for me. You can download it here. http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-rescue-cd
This link will give you instructions on how to create the cd http://www.techmixer.com/avg-rescue-disk-free-avg-bootable-antivirus-cd/
This CD has some cool features besides antivirus scanning. It will allow you to download the latest virus signatures from the internet and it has tools to test memory and do other things.
There are a lot of rescue CD's out there that can save your system if you are infected and some IT geeks will have a preference of one MFG over another so I won't list them all. Most are pretty good and anyone who has dealt with viruses for a long time will tell you that sometimes one software will show a PC is clear and the next software will find a virus the first one missed so having more than one rescue cd on hand is advisable.
One more thing these disks are good for is identifying the base problem of a PC that will not boot. PC's that will not boot fall into 2 basic categories; Hardware is broken or software is broken. With a rescue CD you can attempt to boot the broken PC. If it boots then your hardware is good and you can focus your efforts on software, if it will not boot the cd you can start looking at hardware, for example the motherboard, power supply, ram and cables.
This article lists multiple rescue cd's you can get for free. http://www.techmixer.com/free-bootable-antivirus-rescue-cds-download-list/
I hope this helps the next time you think you are infected and you current antivirus software is not helping.
A buddy of mine runs a PC repair business, 90% of his business is cleaning PC's of viruses and malware. Here is a tip you can use to fix your pc if it becomes infected.
Some of the new and nasty viruses embed themselves deep inside the operating system and use that operating system to hide themselves from virus scanners. The technique many pros used for years was to remove the infected drive from the machine and attach it to a clean machine as just another drive. When they boot the clean machine the infected drive just shows up as another drive and then the operating system on that drive is not in use and thus it can not act as a hiding place for the virus. A virus or malware scan is then initiated from the clean machine and the virus or malware is cleaned up.
Not everyone has a clean PC available and the process of opening the case and removing the hard drive is time consuming so this is where the geeks of the worked have figured out a better way.
The goal is to take the operating system on the C drive out of the picture so what we do is create a bootable CD with an operating system on it and some anti virus software on it. When you boot to the new CD you are running on the operating system that is on the CD and taking the OS on the C drive out of the picture.
This concept has been around in the geek world for a long time and one of the many pioneers was The Ulitimate Boot CD for Windows, UBCD4W which you can google if you want. The UBCD4W has a ton of free tools and may be too advanced for the casual user. However there are some fantastic tools out there that are free and easy to use.
Many of the Antivirus software manufactures have created rescue CD's. The popular AVG antivirus software has a pretty good tool that has worked well for me. You can download it here. http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-rescue-cd
This link will give you instructions on how to create the cd http://www.techmixer.com/avg-rescue-disk-free-avg-bootable-antivirus-cd/
This CD has some cool features besides antivirus scanning. It will allow you to download the latest virus signatures from the internet and it has tools to test memory and do other things.
There are a lot of rescue CD's out there that can save your system if you are infected and some IT geeks will have a preference of one MFG over another so I won't list them all. Most are pretty good and anyone who has dealt with viruses for a long time will tell you that sometimes one software will show a PC is clear and the next software will find a virus the first one missed so having more than one rescue cd on hand is advisable.
One more thing these disks are good for is identifying the base problem of a PC that will not boot. PC's that will not boot fall into 2 basic categories; Hardware is broken or software is broken. With a rescue CD you can attempt to boot the broken PC. If it boots then your hardware is good and you can focus your efforts on software, if it will not boot the cd you can start looking at hardware, for example the motherboard, power supply, ram and cables.
This article lists multiple rescue cd's you can get for free. http://www.techmixer.com/free-bootable-antivirus-rescue-cds-download-list/
I hope this helps the next time you think you are infected and you current antivirus software is not helping.