My brother in law got a nasty virus that prevented him from using his computor. He made the usual mistakes like using IE, never getting any of the service packs for win xp and not having a functional virus killer on his comp. So I had him reformat the HD. Now the question is, he has a external Hd that has a bunch of his back up artwork/songs etc. He wants to retrieve that info and use the external HD. I told him not to as the virus may have migrated to the external.
So was I right to have him hold off using the external....and
If so how can he retrieve that info?
Security External HD
Re: Security External HD
I don't think so. As long as no code is executed off the external drive and it's just data he retrieves, he should be ok.
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Krom
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Re: Security External HD
Do not use the Autorun prompt, explore the drive manually with windows explorer; Autorun can and often does execute code, which makes it a common attack vector (IIRC Microsoft killed Autorun in a recent patch for XP because it was so broken.).
Otherwise just plugging it in and copying some known data files off it should be safe.
One small safety measure: do not boot the computer with the external drive still attached. Running a couple complete scans on it with different and up to date virus scanners probably wouldn't hurt but is not entirely necessary if you are just going to copy the files you need then wipe the drive.
Otherwise just plugging it in and copying some known data files off it should be safe.
One small safety measure: do not boot the computer with the external drive still attached. Running a couple complete scans on it with different and up to date virus scanners probably wouldn't hurt but is not entirely necessary if you are just going to copy the files you need then wipe the drive.