Minor Surgery, or How to Absolutely, Positvely GET RID of that VIRUS/TROJAN/WHATEVER

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What if your computer is infected with a virus or something very bad, and you cannot get it to stay up long enough without crashing to run a complete scan, or it will not boot and you've tried to clean it with an anti-virus program from your bootable cd or dvd drive, BUT...there is stuff on there you REALLY WANT? How to get that stuff?

Well, one way, is to boot from a clean, primary boot disk, with the infected disk(s) attached, and then clean up those disks.

With a modern system that allows you to boot from an external USB or eSata drive, it's a simple thing to attach such a drive, boot to your computer's BIOS, set the machine's BOOT priority order to boot first to the USB or eSata drive of your choice, save your settings and then boot to the external drive.

You can now safely clean those compromised disks. Once you are done, just reverse these steps. Shutdown the computer; remove the external drive; boot the the BIOS and set the BOOT priority back the way it was; reboot the original disk.

Of course, you have to get a bootable external hard drive to make this work, but external hard drives have become very cheap these days, under a hundred dollars for a 500GB drive if you look round.

If you have one already, great. If not, get one, and remember, afterwards you have a wonderful backup device!

Then you have to install the OS on it. I will assume you still have the copy of XP or Vista you system came with, so you just set the computer to boot to your USB or eSata drive as explained above, and then to the CD/DVD drive and install to the empty drive when the OS gives you the option to do so.

Be sure not to install to your old, infected drive, or you will wipeout all of your data. If you are worried about doing so you can take the side panel or cover off of the machine and remove the power supply connector or the data cable to that drive. Then it will not show up as a possible install target. Your manual should show you how to do this; if not take a look at this instruction from The Hardware Zone.

You can also put a brand new hard disk in the computer using the same instructions, install the OS to that drive, and then install the original drive as a secondary drive by adding it to another SATA port on the motherboard, using the cable which came with the new hard drive, and a spare Power Supply cable.

The procedure for cleaning the infected drive is otherwise the same.

Hey, you just saved some dough! Happy now?

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