How to get rid of malware on an external drive?
May 4, 2011 4:45 PM Subscribe
What's the best way to target malware/spyware when it's on an external drive?
AVG gave me messages that I had a trojan, then malware, etc, on my thinkpad; I clicked yes, please quarantine, etc, to get rid of it. Well, I got a bluescreen. I tried to restore (I know now that wasn't a great idea). Well, I have a cable that let me take the hard drive out and access it as an external on another computer, and I've done that, saved just about everything important that I can think of. I've got the instructions to get rid of malware from deezil's userinfo, but I was wondering if there was a simpler way - if I could just use one of the anti-malware programs on the drive while it's connected like an external drive.
I ran spybot search and destroy and it came up with nothing; I don't see a way to make sure it searches peripheral drives.
Any help that keeps me from having to reformat would be greatly appreciated.
AVG gave me messages that I had a trojan, then malware, etc, on my thinkpad; I clicked yes, please quarantine, etc, to get rid of it. Well, I got a bluescreen. I tried to restore (I know now that wasn't a great idea). Well, I have a cable that let me take the hard drive out and access it as an external on another computer, and I've done that, saved just about everything important that I can think of. I've got the instructions to get rid of malware from deezil's userinfo, but I was wondering if there was a simpler way - if I could just use one of the anti-malware programs on the drive while it's connected like an external drive.
I ran spybot search and destroy and it came up with nothing; I don't see a way to make sure it searches peripheral drives.
Any help that keeps me from having to reformat would be greatly appreciated.
Aaaaand then I had to retract what I said above. Seems as the only thing that will let you scan on a drive slaved into your machine is MalwareBytes. So there's that. But once you throw the drive back in the machine, install and scan away.
posted by deezil at 8:14 AM on May 5, 2011
posted by deezil at 8:14 AM on May 5, 2011
Response by poster: Thank you so much. I ran malwarebytes with the drive as an external, then popped it back in and ran both malwarebyes and spybot and it's back to good. Your help was just invaluable!
posted by lemniskate at 12:36 PM on May 6, 2011
posted by lemniskate at 12:36 PM on May 6, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
You can run Malwarebytes on the drive when it's hooked up externally, but I've seen some things that don't get found. My suggestions, run one pass with it hooked up externally both with MalwareBytes and Hitman Pro, then put the drive back in the machine, boot into safe mode with networking, install both programs on the drive, update, and run again.
posted by deezil at 5:07 PM on May 4, 2011 [4 favorites]