My son's laptop has Windows XP operating syste, with MacaFee anti-virus.
He was watching a Simpson's episode online when MacaFee popped up with a Trojan warning. He paged away from the site and Windows Defender ( a bogus Russian anti-virus
program started firing up popups. Macafee was unable to remove the virus, so he tried MalwareBytes, Kaspersky and finally Rogers(Norton) all to no avail.
While Norton was attempting to clean the virus, Windows Defender was bus deleting system files. Norton requested a restart, but the result was immediate logout. Safe mode login gave blue screen of death.
I attempted to clone the drive to an external hardrive. The process completed but the file showed a lenght of zero bytes and could not be opened in Windows.
I then tried an Ubuntu install, which finally told me that there was no root table, and as a result, it couldn't partition the drive. I aborted the install. Not sure if Linux could have rebuilt the root table.
I then rebooted the laptop, using Linux Mint this time, and without installing, copied all the files to the External Harddrive. Note that any viruses in these files were completely
unable to disrupt this process. Linux rules!
When I plugged this into my Windows Desktop and ran Norton, it found 706 viruses.
Thes had embedded themselves in program files and could not be cleaned. They were quarantined and deleted. Fortunately all my son's music, videos and documents were saved.
He is now reloading Windows XP and will probably have to reload a bunch of other programs too.
What I learned:
You can use any Linux live-install disk to recover your Windows files.
Even if you don't want to install Ubuntu or Mint, have the ISO handy to save your bacon!
MacaFee is total crap. Despite being up-to-date it failed badly.
If you get a virus on a laptop, you'd better have an external hard drive to help fix it.
Viruses overpower Windows anti-virus programs by starting up so many instances of the virus that the anti-virus program can't cope. I call it a barrage attack.
This was my way of dealing with this. Feel free to offer other suggestions.
He was watching a Simpson's episode online when MacaFee popped up with a Trojan warning. He paged away from the site and Windows Defender ( a bogus Russian anti-virus
program started firing up popups. Macafee was unable to remove the virus, so he tried MalwareBytes, Kaspersky and finally Rogers(Norton) all to no avail.
While Norton was attempting to clean the virus, Windows Defender was bus deleting system files. Norton requested a restart, but the result was immediate logout. Safe mode login gave blue screen of death.
I attempted to clone the drive to an external hardrive. The process completed but the file showed a lenght of zero bytes and could not be opened in Windows.
I then tried an Ubuntu install, which finally told me that there was no root table, and as a result, it couldn't partition the drive. I aborted the install. Not sure if Linux could have rebuilt the root table.
I then rebooted the laptop, using Linux Mint this time, and without installing, copied all the files to the External Harddrive. Note that any viruses in these files were completely
unable to disrupt this process. Linux rules!
When I plugged this into my Windows Desktop and ran Norton, it found 706 viruses.
Thes had embedded themselves in program files and could not be cleaned. They were quarantined and deleted. Fortunately all my son's music, videos and documents were saved.
He is now reloading Windows XP and will probably have to reload a bunch of other programs too.
What I learned:
You can use any Linux live-install disk to recover your Windows files.
Even if you don't want to install Ubuntu or Mint, have the ISO handy to save your bacon!
MacaFee is total crap. Despite being up-to-date it failed badly.
If you get a virus on a laptop, you'd better have an external hard drive to help fix it.
Viruses overpower Windows anti-virus programs by starting up so many instances of the virus that the anti-virus program can't cope. I call it a barrage attack.
This was my way of dealing with this. Feel free to offer other suggestions.
