[Beewee]

Ok, I know this is wrong place to be asking this but I need to know. Is there anyway I can use a 256MB Flash drive to disinfect a PC laptop? Or is there any way I could hook her computer up to mine to do it. Use an ipod? Basically a friend of mine got infected and now her anti-virus stuff won't work so she can't disinfect. She doesn't have the CDs to do a clean install and reformat so I'm looking for work-arounds. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ghporter]

If you can boot from the flash drive you can reload a PC's OS. That's the catch; it's hard to set up a flash drive to boot from. Why doesn't she have a CD to boot from? Is her computer one of those that tell you to make a CD from the "special" partition for restoring?

A "restore" disc from the manufacturer will indeed disinfect the computer, but it will probably overwrite all the user data too... don't use that! Another thing to try is putting her AV software (up to date!) on the flash drive and disinfecting the computer from there.

And once she has the computer running properly again MAKE HER SET UP HER AV SOFTWARE TO RUN ALL THE TIME AND TO UPDATE ITSELF REGULARLY!!! With PCs you cannot be lax about that.

[brokenjago]

uhhh.

What would you put on the 256 MB flash drive? Many cirsues have stand alone applications that clean them, avalable from Norton or McAfee, free of charge. Check them out.

[wataru]

"Virii" is not the proper pluralization of "virus."

[ghporter]

You put the ANTIVIRUS APPLICATION on the flash drive and run it from there; if it isn't part of the existing file system it won't be corrupted (yet) so you should be able to have it scan the computer and disinfect it.

And wataru is right-it's "viruses."