Well, somewhat affiliated with my previous infection, I have been suggested by CatByte to backup important data and to format the HDD. However, the virus appears to have spread throughout the entire HDD. I first thought of connecting the infected HDD as a slave to my clean pc and scanning that drive with AVG, which would be However, after posting this in the General Hardware subforum, my helper said that it seems a be too risky without sending it to a trained professional, and I should come here for advise.
So that being said, I am just wondering what you think of that method? Would that be too risky? Also, what about following from different support forum suggesting to copy the files to a storage media that you don't care whether it gets infected or not, and scan it right after you format the HDD. What could be the potential risk withis method. IMO, as long as I do not explorer the storage media, and tell AVG to scan that media, what other precautions do I need to take into consideration?
There's no way with file infectors to guarantee that it won't propagate over when plugged in - honestly, the safest bet is to get a PC shop to do it.
If not, I'd say no to your plan of connecting it as a slave to your clean PC, there's too much risk that it would spread over.
I'm not sure I have any great ideas, but my biggest recommendations would be that autorun is disabled, you shouldn't browse to anything Explorer, and should thoroughly scan it before going anywhere near it. Still treat all executable files on the drive as compromised.
Raktor, since you probably do not know everythijng that has happened through the the time CatBytes was helping me, I will give you a breif description. During CatBytes was helping me, there have been some things I had to do. Firstly, both IE and Firefox are infected, and off and on I cannot access the internet. When I can access the internet, the only browser I have been able to use is a very old version of Netscape, which is version 7.0. Another thing I had to do was to completely uninstall AVG 9.0. The reason was because AVG was constantly popping up virus infection notices faster then I could click on the OK button. So pretty much as of now, I have no Internet or an AV package installed. That being said, I am wondering what would be the best route so that I could do a thourogh scan to this infected HDD? If I could get my hands on a boot virus scanner, do you think that would be the best route or is that not enough? Also, just to let you know, if worse comes to worse, if you could help me at least backup my documents, that would be much appreciated. Thanks Bob
I don't hold out much hope for PCs that have been hit by file infectors, if it happened to me I'd restore from a backup and start fresh, they're starting to infect .doc and .pdf files now so you can never be sure.
