On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Jerry Jones wrote:
A co-worker & friend of my wife asked if I would be willing to look at their
PC. Appearantly they have a bad virus infestation on their PC and have not
been using an anti-virus program. They have spoke to tech support at Gateway
and were told that they may be best off backing up their data and reformating.
I have not seen the PC yet so I don't know how bad it is. I have never had to
deal with a PC that has a virus and has NO anti-virus at all.
I am looking for suggestions of what software tools I should bring with me
when I go look at the PC. I have a bootable Norton Anti-virus disc and can let
it scan the PC and try to clean it up. Is there something better that I should
use? If I do have to reformat and re-install the OS, what is the best way to
backup the data and not re-infect the PC when the data is restored?
From a time/value perspective, if you can get them to agree to a reformat
that is generally what I prefer to do. Backup their data (Now they have a
known good backup) and reinstall windows. This gives you the advantage of
installing the latest bios/drivers/updates, etc while not worrying about
remnants of virus infections from installations past.
The amount of time you will spend cleaning the system, rebooting, etc
rarely justifies doing the cleaning on a system you can just format and
restore data to instead.
Just make sure you backup all the data they could need.
That said, if you really want to attempt to clean as opposed to
formatting, you can get yourself a Bart disk and boot from that and run
your antivirus, or take the drive out and put it into a USB2/Firewire and
scan it from a known good machine.
Christopher Fisk
--
"`That young girl is one of the least benightedly
unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound
lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.'"
- Marvin's first ever compliment about anybody.
