Reformatting after Ramnit infection

Hello - Been battling a Ramnit infection for a week or so with the help of Satchfan on the forum here. End result is that I am having to reformat. I desperately need to save some files (non-executable) and in particular my Thunderbird profile which contains all my business correspondence. At present I have transferred all of these to a USB stick while I go ahead with the reformat. Satchfan suggested that before doing anything more with these files I should start a topic here. I'll be very grateful for any advice you can give. Thankyou - Tonyp

Hi, I have not had time to check your topic in malware removal, but the ramnit infection is a nasty one. A format and reinstall sounds like a good idea, ( preferably by reimaging) but do remember that ramnit is notorious for jumping on to flash drives (USB memory sticks and the like.) It is of course your call but personally I would not trust any back up or copied files made post infection. If you use files copied or backed up or imaged well before the infection took hold then you should be OK. If you use a disc image made some time before you were infected then you should be up and running again in less time than it takes to walk the dog. Post back if you need any help on the procedures to be followed. Regards paws

Thanks for that Paws. I'm afraid the copies were made post infection. I scanned the USB stick with Eset NOD32 in a clean machine - it didn't find any infection - not sure what to think. Trouble is, I need these files desperately. Also I've no idea what reimaging is, could you point me toward a little info on this? Thanks - Tonyp

Here is my little speech on backing up:

I'd recommend getting an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure, with fan (I like to keep drives cool) and a drive as large as or larger than your current drive, either PATA/IDE or SATA, which ever the enclosure supports, or one of the newer backup drives . Alternatively, you could add a 2nd hard drive internally to your computer (PATA/IDE or SATA, depends on what your system supports) and use it to backup to in place of, or in addition to the external drive. I use both a 2nd (3rd actually) internal hard drive and an external hard drive and Online Backup via Carbonite.

Then you can buy Acronis True Image (my preference) or Norton Ghost or go the free route and use DriveImage XML or Macrium Reflect Free Edition (I use this on my systems at work).

If you go the DIXML route (I use this on my Web Server) then you will want to also get and build Ultimate Boot CD For Windows (UBCD4WIN). It is a bootable CD that you create on your computer using your own copy of Windows XP. One of it's included tools is DIXML so in the event of a hard drive failure you just replace the drive, boot the UBCD4WIN CD and restore from your external USB drive.

Macrium Reflect has an option to create a System Rescue disk that you can boot to restore a Macrium backup with. Necessary in case you can't boot the hard drive.

Rule #1: Keep the backup current.

I use Acronis and keep 4 sets of backups, each holding 1 weeks data which is one full backup and 6 incremental backups on my internal drive. I backup up my data only continuously via Carbonite and my C:, D: , E: and F: drives to my other internal drive at 10:30PM. When the backup completes it shuts down the system after a 60 second warning. Full backup takes a little over 30 minutes, incrementals take 3-4 minutes.

Evey month or two or whenever I make significant changes to my system, I do a full backup to my external USB 2.0 500Gb hard drive. I also use this same drive to backup my Laptop and my Web Server.

I have never lost a single byte of data in all the years I've been using computers.