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Can I do this ?

361 views 7 replies 7 participants last post by  guyladouche 
#1 ·
Someone I know has a little problem. They had a bunch of virus's and went to one of those virus cleaning places. The person ended up breaking the computer (motherboard is shot).

What I want to do is hook up their hard drive to my computer and run their os as a virtual machine within my OS. By doing this I want to get rid of the virus's and move the files off that os and onto my computer.

Is this possible ? I vaguely remember doing something like this with VMware in school, but I was honestly not paying attention at the time.
 
#2 ·
I think you will have to make a image of the the drive(?).You use this image to boot in vmware,do the cleaning,format the original drive and put the data back.
 
#4 ·
Use a Linux LiveCD and remove/retrieve. I've done this several times for windows guys. I don't get how a MoBo got broken from a virus cleaning lol...
 
#5 ·
You might be able to boot into safe mode with the hard drive on your computer as long as you have the hard drive set to what he did on his computer, meaning IDE or AHCI. You wont be able to scan for viruses on the linux live cds like knoppix but you could try kaspersky rescue disk.

If you cant do anything but take the data from that hard drive under windows then you can just can install comodo time machine on your pc before hand so that when you reboot it will revert back everything before you hooked up the hard drive in case of a virus.
 
#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by UsedPaperclip;14535876
... You wont be able to scan for viruses on the linux live cds... but you could try kaspersky rescue disk.
.
Uh... yeah... you can! Again, Done it. Several times. I use an Ubuntu Based OS in Live session, then open terminal,

Code:

Code:
sudo apt-get install clamav
Then again in terminal, because its faster,

Code:

Code:
clam
Start virus scanning... its a piece of cake. Point is. You sir, are wrong.

If you use a LiveCD of an RPM distro, use

Code:

Code:
sudo 'yum install clamav'
but you may have to set up root if its Fedora, which makes things harder, which is why, in this case only, I use an Ubuntu based liveCD.

I think Arch types are

Code:

Code:
pacman -S clamav
correct me if I'm wrong guys. I'm not an Arch user.
 
#7 ·
Just a suggestion. Do you absolutely need to boot the OS at all?

Why can't you get a HDD to USB adapter and simply copy the files to a safe place? (Or just plug into another computer using regular SATA or whatever)

Of course you'd lose the OS, but I bet at this point a reinstall would be quite a bit faster than recovery and virus removal.

Good luck, man.
 
#8 ·
I've never considered the point before, but can you run a physical disk/install as a virtual disk when it's a separate OS on a separate physical partition? I would think that you can't, but I really have no idea. Interested to see if anyone knows the answer (aside from fixing the virus-infected partition).
 
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