On Friday 22 May 2009 11:51:32 Paul A. Pennington wrote: > Sorry, I should have explained why I want to do this. It seems every > time a friend asks for help with his computer, it's so choked with viruses > that it takes hours to do the simplest task. There's never a backup, so > reformatting is not an option. I need a bootable CD to clean up the hard > drive enough to make a backup of the data files in a reasonable time. > Frequently, the old computer is going to the recycler after the files are > retreived, so reloading does not come up at all. > > Andre', thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at the F-Secure CD. Does > anyone else have experience with an Antivirus Rescue CD? > > Paul Pennington > Augusta, Georgia
If I may, let me make a comment about this. I too get diseased systems with a plea of "help...!" all too often these days. And yes, backups are illegal in most states judging from the lack of them. So what I do is take the disk out and stuff it into one of my OpenBSD boxes and make a copy of the disk with tar. I then have a copy of the filesystem, so I can expunge the system with a rebuild. I simply do not rust AV programs to be able to fix a compromised system. They can usually defend against stuff, but once something has crawled into a system, thats it. The only way to kill it is to rebuild. But before I put the users data back in place, I removed all .exe, .com, .dll, .scr, .msi, ,inf and .pif files, trying to lessen the likelyhood of bringing back some little treat from the infected filesystem. --STeve Andre' _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
