Best way to securely clean infected USB sticks and hard drives?

UberTiger

UberTiger

UberTiger

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Right, got a couple of usb sticks and external hard drives and an old internal hard drive of my housemates with important work on all. I've good reason to believe he old PC was riddled and one of her USB sticks was apparently detected as having a 'worm' on it when plugged into a uni computer the other day.
No she didn't quarantine or clean or remove, but promptly decided to freak out, just pull it out, have a melt down and is now paranoid that there's a ****ing worm living in her handbag.

I need to clean all of her drives, whilst saving all of the work, whilst hopefully protecting my PCs. I loaned her my laptop last week and I think her infected stuff has already jiggered it as sections of AVG are now disabled and won't update although there's no other signs it's been compromised (Mbam still works but threw up nothing). Not a big deal as I can re-image the drive but still.

Can anyone advice the best software/procedure to carry out a thorough cleansing whilst retaining the data? Assuming (AVG didn't even detect the worm in the first place on my laptop)

Thanks!
 
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Uninstall AVG.

Install Microsoft Security Essentials.

Disable autorun.

Plug drives in and clean.

If you're really paranoid that they're likely to be infected then use something like Steady state.
 
Jaja, got MSE on my desktop now and will image it before plugging them in. Looks like steady state only work on xp and vista so I'll leave that for now

Cheers
 
I hope you're not planning to plug in any of those, while logged in as Admin. :p

If you must clean from within Windows, at least make sure that:

1. Autoplay / Autorun is disabled.

2. You are logged in as a Standard User.

I'd use multiple Antivirus Rescue CDs. Since they run outside Windows, they are unlikely to interfere with each other.

Avira

Kaspersky

BitDefender
 
Ahh right. Not done it yet, will do it tonight. I'm the only user on my computer and it defaults to admin when I log on believe, no password. I just checked my user accounts screen and it says I'm the administrator. Should I create a new standard user account just for this purpose?
 
Bugger, I just realised I unplugged my DVD drive to free up a sata plug for an extra hard drive :rolleyes: :D Time to dismantle system just to burn an iso. I really don't use discs that much these days!
 
When dealing with infected removable storage I always boot a Live CD, take the files off, format, and put the files back.
 
theheyes said:
When dealing with infected removable storage I always boot a Live CD, take the files off, format, and put the files back.
Click to expand...

exactly what i was going to suggest.

i keep a bootable USB-flash disk of Xubuntu in my bag at all times for this and other reasons. :)
 
UberTiger said:
Bugger, I just realised I unplugged my DVD drive to free up a sata plug for an extra hard drive :rolleyes: :D Time to dismantle system just to burn an iso. I really don't use discs that much these days!
Click to expand...

I burnt nothing!

I have all the needed ISOs on one flash disk, all booted by Grub2 / Grub4DOS.
 
Put them in to a linux based machine, or run them from a live cd environment and format it.

I have disabled autorun for anti-virus purposes on my home machine, so i can just put it on and then don't open the drive, just right click on it, format, quick format. done.
 
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