Hi!
I've another computer that's been overloaded with viri, on a Win XP system, to the point that trying to login with the administrator account results in an immediate freeze, and logging in through the user account results in a system plagued by pop-ups, webpage rerouting, and a refusal by any anti-virus suite to delete or heal the major .exe-based sources.
I was hoping to boot-up off of a Flash drive or a CD, run a virus-scanner from it to cleanse the virus from my main system, and then either resume usage of my main system or, to be extra safe, just copy over what I want to keep onto a Flash drive or external hard-disk (after the files have been scanned in the previous step, of course), and then I'd format the infected disks and start anew on them.
The trouble is, while I can find lots of bootable CD's, or bootable Linux distros that can easily fit onto a Flash drive, the trouble is that I haven't any idea how I'd run a virus scanner off of them. Could Linux-based virus scanners detect Windows-based viri? I just don't know.
Have you any ideas what I might do, apart from a lose-everything format where I copy over nothing beforehand?
Thank you.
I've another computer that's been overloaded with viri, on a Win XP system, to the point that trying to login with the administrator account results in an immediate freeze, and logging in through the user account results in a system plagued by pop-ups, webpage rerouting, and a refusal by any anti-virus suite to delete or heal the major .exe-based sources.
I was hoping to boot-up off of a Flash drive or a CD, run a virus-scanner from it to cleanse the virus from my main system, and then either resume usage of my main system or, to be extra safe, just copy over what I want to keep onto a Flash drive or external hard-disk (after the files have been scanned in the previous step, of course), and then I'd format the infected disks and start anew on them.
The trouble is, while I can find lots of bootable CD's, or bootable Linux distros that can easily fit onto a Flash drive, the trouble is that I haven't any idea how I'd run a virus scanner off of them. Could Linux-based virus scanners detect Windows-based viri? I just don't know.
Have you any ideas what I might do, apart from a lose-everything format where I copy over nothing beforehand?
Thank you.