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My friend brought her netbook over explaining she was unable to get to her desktop, OK no problem I thought I'll just boot into safe mode, do a system restore back a few weeks and bobs your uncle!. Nope!, not to be, as soon as I got anywhere near safe mode it would simply restart the computer. Last known good configuration was a non starter too.
So, as these things rarely come with a disc drive of any description, what do I do now. Having been an avid user of the Ultimate Boot Disc for many years, I thought it's worth a shot because this has a built in virus scanner, so I put the boot disc on USB, booted it up and ran the virus scanner. Everything was fine until I realised the virus definations were grossly outdated!. OK, let's download the latest virus defs and get them on the USB as well. After a morning of searching for the definitions from McAfee I eventually found them, loaded them onto the USB and started up the notebook. Everything went great until it attempted to start scanning, it would just hang. Trying this over a dozen times I eventually gave up.
So, back to the drawing board and I was furious once again to search online for a bootable USB virus solutions only to find hundreds of sites apparently offering this but were completely useless or were not free. This was the main reason I started FreewareBB, I kept searching for freeware only to find a multitude of sites that were useless and were not in fact offering free downloads or even freeware, but shareware or commercial software that they had tagged as "free downloads" to get the keywords searches from the search engines.
So, after a complete day online I eventually came up with a solution to my problem, a virus scanner that can boot up a computer from a USB drive and scan the damn thing!. The solution comes from Kaspersky and here's how to get started:
1. Download the actual rescue disc HERE.
2. Download the additional Kaspersky Bootable Rescue Disk HERE.
3. Now, extract Kaspersky-Bootable-Rescue-Disk.zip to a location on your computer. When you do so you will notice that a folder called "GentooUSB" is now created under the root.
4. You now need to copy the actual rescue disc iso file (kav_rescue_2008.iso) to the "GentooUSB" folder and that folder should now resemble the screenshot below.
5. Now you need to double click the "fixgt2.bat" file and enter the drive letter which corresponds to your USB pen drive. PLEASE MAKE CERTAIN YOU DOUBLE CHECK THE DRIVE LETTER OTHERWISE YOU RUN THE RISK OF OVERWRITING YOUR HARD DRIVE AND DISABLING YOUR COMPUTER!!!.
6. From there, simply follow the on screen instructions and the setup will copy all necessary files on to your USB pen drive and make it bootable.
7. Once the setup has completed, you will need to insert the USB device into the infected computer and make sure the computer can boot from a USB - usually this is a case of enabling it through the BIOS and you would need to refer to the computer manual to find out how this is done but sometimes you can simply pop the USB drive into the computer and start it up and it may give you the option to boot from USB - some machines also give you a quick flash on screen such as "F2 for boot menu" or something similar in which case hit the appropriate key to select the USB drive. Some motherboards simply don't offer the facility to boot from USB, but these are generally older ones so if your computer is only a few years old it shouldn't be a problem, if it's older you may be in trouble!.
Please do let us know if you have success with this as I'm keen to hear just how many people have had similar problems, like me, in finding a suitable USB virus boot disc. For now, happy scanning
Cheers
Marko
