09-02-2015, 11:33 PM
Hello everyone.
A friend of mine has been infected with malware and or viruses. I tried to help remotely, but his internet access is blocked, his antivirus software has been disabled, windows firewall is off and previous tools which I put on there ages ago for him, like Malwarebytes have disappeared. The laptop boots up very slowly and he can even boot up in safe mode with or without networking. Oh, and he never 'got round to' creating any restore disks or backups/images to revert back to and the icing on the cake, all restore points have been deleted too.
He doesn't want to go down the reformat route because he has 2 expensive DJ/music editing applications which were installed for him by a friend who kindly gave him a spare licence, who has now moved abroad and has lost contact with.
I have asked him to send me the HDD to see if I can help him out (he lives miles away) my thinking was, that I could connect the drive via my Caddy/dock and run various tools to eradicate the offending blighters. However, I remember reading somewhere that it is not good practice to run malware removal tools from a harddrive which is docked, unless it is absolutley, necessary. Is this the case?
Would it make sense to set up Oracle VM and use the offending drive (which will be docked via USB) as the main drive for Virtual Box machine and then run the malware tools that way?
Some help would be appreciated, as intially, this looked pretty straight forward, dock it, scan it, repair it, job done. But on hindsight, it's not that simple!
A friend of mine has been infected with malware and or viruses. I tried to help remotely, but his internet access is blocked, his antivirus software has been disabled, windows firewall is off and previous tools which I put on there ages ago for him, like Malwarebytes have disappeared. The laptop boots up very slowly and he can even boot up in safe mode with or without networking. Oh, and he never 'got round to' creating any restore disks or backups/images to revert back to and the icing on the cake, all restore points have been deleted too.
He doesn't want to go down the reformat route because he has 2 expensive DJ/music editing applications which were installed for him by a friend who kindly gave him a spare licence, who has now moved abroad and has lost contact with.
I have asked him to send me the HDD to see if I can help him out (he lives miles away) my thinking was, that I could connect the drive via my Caddy/dock and run various tools to eradicate the offending blighters. However, I remember reading somewhere that it is not good practice to run malware removal tools from a harddrive which is docked, unless it is absolutley, necessary. Is this the case?
Would it make sense to set up Oracle VM and use the offending drive (which will be docked via USB) as the main drive for Virtual Box machine and then run the malware tools that way?
Some help would be appreciated, as intially, this looked pretty straight forward, dock it, scan it, repair it, job done. But on hindsight, it's not that simple!
Remember! You should exercise complete CTRL and you ALT to think carefully before you DELete stuff willy nilly.