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I've got my cousin's computer here that is full of viruses according to
a recent McAfee scan she did and I was wondering what options I might
have for trying to save her pictures and important files before
reformatting it.

She purchased and installed McAfee recently after noticing that her
computer was acting funny. As soon as she loaded it yesterday and did a
scan, it immediately found something like 18 viruses she said. I told
her that she was asking for trouble by not running a virus program from
the get-go on her machine, but too little - too late.

Her daughter deleted the infected files and rebooted, but since then
their machine is even worse off. It won't connect to the internet,
doesn't have the taskbar anywhere on the desktop and I can't get it to
come back up & stay for the life of me (can get it briefly if I
left-click and go Toolbars and click Address, but only for a short time
before it disappears again). Her computer also won't recognize any of
the installed hardware (her floppy drive, CD-RW drive, video card and
so on) and nothing shows up when you go into the Device Manager. It
keeps freezing up and stuff. I booted into Safe mode and it was no
better. I can, however, get into their folders and such on the C drive
but cannot copy any important files to a CD-R because the computer
doesn't recognize the burner and Nero just says that it cannot find the
COM\OLE port or something like that.

My question is would it be possible for me to take her hard drive out
of her machine and put it into my machine as a slave drive and then
just copy the stuff she wants saved onto my hard drive, thus allowing
me to then use my burner to burn it for her? Also, would I be opening
up my machine to possible virus infection (I am running virus software
- AVG and am all up to date and Windows is patched and everything) by
doing so?

Lastly, how am I going to reformat the hard drive in her tower if I
cannot boot from her floppy or CD-Rom drive or get them to even be
detected? Could I format it in mine and then put it back in hers before
installing Windows XP or would that be asking for trouble or more
headaches?

Thanks for your patience guys with the long post and many questions!
Mike

Mike wrote:
> My question is would it be possible for me to take her hard drive out
> of her machine and put it into my machine as a slave drive and then
> just copy the stuff she wants saved onto my hard drive, thus allowing
> me to then use my burner to burn it for her? Also, would I be opening
> up my machine to possible virus infection (I am running virus software
> - AVG and am all up to date and Windows is patched and everything) by
> doing so?

As long as you don't let anything on the infected drive be executed, you
are fine. By the way,
1. what operating system does your good computer have?
2. what file system does your good computer have?
3. what operating system does the infected computer have?
4. what file system does the infected computer have?

Also, Anti-Virus won't help you much. There are a lot of malware that
many AV do no detect. All it takes is one uncaught malware. If you are
worried about accidentally opening infected file, you should use a live CD.

> Lastly, how am I going to reformat the hard drive in her tower if I
> cannot boot from her floppy or CD-Rom drive or get them to even be
> detected? Could I format it in mine and then put it back in hers before
> installing Windows XP or would that be asking for trouble or more
> headaches?

BIOS should still be able to detect hardware normally. If not, the only
choice is a service ticket.

I am running Windows XP Media Center 2002 Edition on NTFS file system
while they are running XP Home Edition on a NTFS file system.

I am just going to copy mostly picture files (their family vacation
shots) and the likes, so I will not click on or open any exe files or
files I am uncertain of. What I might do is just mount an extra hard
drive I have in one of my other machines as a slave to theirs and then
just straight copy paste their pictures onto it before finally
reformatting their machine. Then when I am done I can just copy back
their pics to their Picture folder and remove my hard drive from their
machine.

Stupid question, but can WAB Outlook Express files become infected or
corrupted from these viruses or am I okay to try and save and copy them
over too?

Thanks for your input,
Mike

"Mike" <> wrote in news:1143096224.402519.287830
@t31g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

> Her computer also won't recognize any of
> the installed hardware (her floppy drive, CD-RW drive, video card and
> so on) and nothing shows up when you go into the Device Manager.

You might find these virus removal instructions useful.
http://www.virusspy.com/spyware/removeapropos.html

--
fred