Posted: 4/20/2005 3:27:54 PM EDT
|
A friend gave me a computer to work on that is supposedly full of viruses and wont allow him to run his anti virus software or connect to the internet. My question is, can I pull the harddrive and install it in my box as a slave and run my anti virus software on it without infecting my system? |
Yes, most if not all virus's try to put stuff in the registry and so forth so they auto start and run, when the infected drive is just another drive letter to windows, most AV programes will allow you to scan that too. but, most AV programs will scan your registry, not a slave drive's registry so you still may have problems by not having the AV scan the slave drive's registry files, since it's not the registry files you booted up with |
That's a good practice if you are on a network. We use it on our Mac network. That way we don't have to buy a copy of the AV software for each computer. We boot from a firewire drive, run the program on a server or workstation, and move on. We have just gotten our first ever virus, "Are You Surprised." It's a macro virus that screws up MS Word files. Not very evil, just a PITA. |
