Another Way to Recover an Infected System

Since hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper every few months, your system will likely benefit by swapping in a new drive. Don't do this if the system is under warranty, but if it's beyond warranty, you can get a bigger capacity hard drive for very little money.

1. Buy an external case; they are cheap, and come with USB or Firewire or USB+Firewire interfaces. Buy what your computer needs, usually USB is fine.

2. Remove the infected drive from your system, and mount it in the external case.

2. Install the new, larger capacity hard drive in your computer.

3. Install Windows, choosing the Format Hard Disk option.

4. Install a good anti-virus program.

5. Re-install the software you normally use.

6. Copy your data files from the external portable drive, which has your infected drive, to the new hard drive in your computer. The anti-virus program will tell you which files are infected; do what it says.

After this, you can use the external hard drive as a backup, but run a virus-scan on it first to eliminate anything bad.

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Copyright © 2007 Doug Anderson
Last modified: 11 May 2007