Infected Laptop Drive Question


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I'm working on my daughter's friend's laptop. It's totally infected to the point that I'll probably just reload Windows

Her mother recently died and she has a ton of pictures she hopes to save. I put the drive in a USB enclosure and it shows up in my computer.

I've already scanned the drive with several online scanners and supposedly nothing shows, but I know better. With the drive back in the laptop, The malware just takes over until it finally reaches the Desktop and then it's non-responsive, even in safemode.

If I hook it back up to my computer, what are the chances of infecting my computer while downloading the .jepegs? Do viruses attach to pics.?

Mark

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I have been done that procedure for over two years on tons of drives and never have got infected. Viruses can't just run by themselves. They are just sitting their dormant on the drive. The only reason they run on her computer is because their are registry entries that make it happen.

The only two ways I could think you could possibly get infected would be to double click an infected file, or possibly autorun. In theory, if the drive is plugged in and has autorun enabled, it could possibly run a dormant piece of malware that is autorun aware. Temporarily disable autorun on all of your drives before you plug it in.

For what its worth, I don't even have anti-virus installed on my main workstation, the one I use to back up client hardrives, and have yet to get infected. One dumb thing I do, which may get me in trouble, is allowing infected machines on my internal lan. I suppose a network aware virus could cause havoc for me someday.

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That's what I figured. I went ahead and copied them the other day. Now I just have to wait for the restore disk. It supposedly has a recovery partition, but I couldn't get it to work

Mark

Liz, your idea wasn't a bad one but this girl had so many pictures I probably would have crashed Photobuckets server :P

Edited by garmanma
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as to the recovery partition, did you try "ctrl F11"(I am assuming you did). The timing can be tough. I have had systems that would not go into the revocery console at first. Usually if I kept using that key combination at different times during boot up it works. If nothing elase, just hold down the ctrl, then just start tapping the F11 key. With dells, you may get a keyboard error if you press it to many times. On some dells, wait until the dell copy write line apears, then try the combination.

The ironic thing, I have a newer dell in my shop that I am not able to get to go into activate the recovery process. Like you, I am getting to the point to just do a manual install. If I do this, my client will lose some of the preloaded software that can be useful.

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Quick question before I go rooting around Dell's site. The keyboard's messed up. The S and F key doesn't work and I want to use a regular USB mouse and keyboard. Is there a function key combination to use to disable the onboard ones?

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Quick question before I go rooting around Dell's site. The keyboard's messed up. The S and F key doesn't work and I want to use a regular USB mouse and keyboard. Is there a function key combination to use to disable the onboard ones?

Not that I am aware of. Why do you need to disable it, just use the usb instead.

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The touchpad was acting funky with both plugged in. I finally disabled it. What has happened is they allowed her 2 year old daughter to bang on the touchpad and keyboard. The mouse buttons are unresponsive 50% of the time. I'll give her the option of replacement or USB. Other than that no problems so far. Just get everything reloaded

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