[bishopazrael]

So I'm back to being a bench monkey for a computer repair shop. We're getting tons of PC's infected with virus'. I want to use my macbook to scan hard drives that I pull from the PC's and put into a usb external cage. I did some reading and came up with Virusbarrier x5, but I wanted to know if there's any other techs out there that use their Mac in a PC repair shop, what A/V do you use to scan Windows drives? What other tech tools do you use on the Mac to fix drives?

[bishopazrael]

No one? WTF??? Come on... someone's gotta have some input here. Surely at least ONE person on this board supports a Windows environment with their mac? No one here has any input for a good AV scanner for daily bench work?

Thanks guys.

Really.

[ghporter]

Sorry I can't give you better support than you already have. Your idea makes tons of sense though-using a different platform to scan PC drives for problemware should be very safe and effective.

For what it's worth, I've been using my school-provided Norton AV on both my iMac and MBP, and this is supposed to find PC stuff too. But I don't know whether it would be as useful and effective for you as you'll need for production bench work, and it's not cheap.

Have you thought about just trying Clam or one of the other free Mac AVs to see if it'll find Windows bugs?

[bishopazrael]

It will... but clam takes forever to scan. So far I've got a clean install of xp on the bench pc with avg free and that runs loads faster than clam av. Thus far I've been there just about 2 weeks and I've used my macbook for av scans, disk repair, data recovery from deleted files and a wiped hdd. My macbook, aside from my 2gb thumbdrive with my pc software tools is by far my best tool. I'm really surprised I'm the only one that's doing this.

Its either that or someone else is doing it like I am... has read this and decided not to share the love.

Either way, I've proven to my bosses that having a tech with a Mac side is a true bonus.

[bob-nine]

I support thousands of windows PC. But in a effort to keep my personal mac separate, do not connect it to the network. We manage infections by backing up the data, and laying down a new image (GHOST).

I did use my MacBook once when a HDD died. The MBR and FAT was hosed. But the Mac did not care. I plugged it in as a USB drive and pulled all the data.

One of the security guys was whining that I do not have any AV on it, so I am looking around for what other folks use.

[seanc]

For PCs that come in that are infested with viruses, we usually try and contain that HDD to the PC it came in with, otherwise it just stands more chance of getting confused with another HDD or damaged in the move.

If it's not an easy one to clear out, or the infestation is REALLY bad, we just do a backup, nuke and pave either from a slipstreamed disk (if the PC is too old for WDS) or deployed from the Windows Deployment Services server, then copy the data back.

I'm usually the unfortunate one who ends up with users documents backed up all over my hard drives & desktop, AVG will pick up viruses within them on the daily scan and unfortunately Picasa has a habit of importing every picture file it can find.....

I had considered using Linux to scan the HDDs, since there's AVG for Linux but never bothered with it. I have a Linux PC around for hooking finicky HDDs up to for data recovery. Windows will hang when I plug them in, but plug them into a Linux box (sometimes a force mount is required to clear the log files) and you're away, that sometimes even kicks Windows into doing a disk check which fixes the corruption problems completely.

There's a Windows program out, released by Microsoft called SteadyState that you can use to lock the PC down, I'm pretty sure that one feature is that you can do what you like to a Windows session, but on reboot, it forgets what you did and puts it back to how it was. That could be invaluable for preventing virus infestation on the scanning PCs.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...s/default.mspx

Anyway, what I was really trying to say, is just use the tool that works best for the situation you have. If one doesn't work, try another. Trying to get an all in one solution the MacBook seems a bit too optimistic.