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Sat Aug 09, 2008 3:04 pm Post subject:
Need a fresh start |
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I'm planning on wiping everything off of my hard drive and starting over. Some idiot was on my computer and got into a nice big batch of trojans and spy ware. I'm having trouble getting rid of it, and I have no restore points for some reason.
All I really need to do is back up my music, videos, and a few programs. If I copy these over to a data cd, will I be able to put them back on my computer with ease? How should I go about doing this?
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Sat Aug 09, 2008 4:54 pm Post subject:
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Personally, I would recommend running some of the various anti-spyware and anti-trojan programs, along with Avast, and maybe a couple of other anti-virus programs... Run them over and over until they all report no issues on your computer...
The problem with saving files to a CD and then putting them back on a clean system is that chances are some of those files may be infected, in which case, you'll just be right back at square 1 when you reinstall them...
Worst case scenario, and I've had to do this with both my wife and stepdaughter's computers, do a complete wipe of your HDD and start from scratch... The drawback to this is that you lose everything that you don't already have backups for...
But if you know that you have an infected hard drive, making backups now is pointless...
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Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!
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Sat Aug 09, 2008 5:39 pm Post subject:
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Spybot S&D ought to take care of most of the problems as well as some windows updates like the malicious software removal tools.. then run your updated Avast/AVG/Trend Micro etc... should be ok.
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http://docer.blogspot.com/
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Sat Aug 09, 2008 6:35 pm Post subject:
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If you want to re-install Windows, it's not that big a deal, and will certainly get rid of your virus problem.
You need to back up your documents, music, pictures, videos, etc to CD or another drive (internal or external) first obviously. Don't worry about any virus problems with this kind of data, it's not infected. Viruses infect EXE's and DLL's and other program files (there are examples of infections in "data" files like pictures or videos, but they are so rare as to be non-existent.)
You can back up "settings" for programs if you want, like using MozBackup to save all your firefox bookmarks and settings, copying over your "player" directory from Call Of Duty 4 to save your game settings and ranks, ect.
DO NOT COPY OVER ANY INSTALLED PROGRAMS. They probably won't work in the new setup since the corresponding changes to the registry they need won't have been made and support files saved in ..\system32 and other places won't be there, and THEY MAY BE INFECTED. You are going to have to reinstall all your applications and games, either from original CD or by downloaded them again from wherever you got them.
Once you have all your irreplaceable data backed up somewhere, just put in the Windws CD. Boot from it, and paying careful attention to what it is telling you DELETE THE ENTIRE DISK PARTITION which currently contains Windows. Recreate the partition and tell Windows to install to it, so you get a clean install. (Installing over top of an existing Windows installation will accomplish nothing.)
Once Windows is all installed, Stop...
Using Internet Explorer, which comes with Windows, download and INSTALL AN ANTIVIRUS BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE. DO NOT INSTALL ANY OTHER SOFTWARE FROM YOUR BACKUP, DO NOT COPY BACK DATA, AND DO NOT USE YOUR WEB BROWSER FOR ANY OTHER REASON BEFORE YOU HAVE AVAST, AVG, OR SOME OTHER VIRUS PROGRAM INSTALLED. Studies show that most new installations where an antivirus isn't installed are compromised in some way within 5 MINUTES of first booting up if the person starts going out to the internet to download software and such.
Now you have a half a day or more of work to do whatever tweaking and configuring of Windows you normally like, reinstall all your applications, and copy back all your "data".
It's mostly just a lot of work reinstalling stuff from CD or from downloads. But you will be fine.
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Sat Aug 09, 2008 11:35 pm Post subject:
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Thanks for all the help. I found a deal on a 320GB external drive. I put all my meaningful files (vids, pics, music) on it, and now I'm in the process of install all the updates and drivers. All the info really helped. 
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Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:01 am Post subject:
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| DeathByMunky wrote: | | Thanks for all the help. I found a deal on a 320GB external drive. I put all my meaningful files (vids, pics, music) on it, and now I'm in the process of install all the updates and drivers. All the info really helped. |
Once you have a good "baseline" installation of Windows with all your drivers and service packs and Windows updates current and such, I would STRONGLY recommend you look at getting a copy of Acronis True Image Home. It will allow you to take an "image" of your nice clean Windows installation and save it to that new 320GiG external drive you got. Now if you ever need to install Windows again, you just pop in the Acronis Recovery CD (which you make with the program first thing), boot from it, tell it to "restore" and go have have lunch. When you come back, your computer will be EXACTLY as it was when you created the image, down to the boot sector on the hard drive.
You can also use Acronis to make scheduled nightly backups of your system while you sleep, which will let you do the same thing and recover your computer to the exact state it was the night before. This will allow you pretty much complete piece of mind, as if you run into some problem that has your system hosed up, rather than scratching your head and running tons of anti-spyware and antivirus and scouring Google for solutions, you just pop in the Acronis CD and in 1/2 hour you are looking at your system the way it was the previous night.
The reason I suggest both a permanent fixed "baseline" image and a nightly backup, is that you will find that in 6-8 months you are going to want to re-install Windows in any case, just because Windows gets all bloated and slow over time from installing and uninstalling stuff that leaves crap behind, tons of programs that you installed that looked good and you found you never use, and just general crankiness because Windows installations age more like a gallon of milk left in the fridge than a bottle of fine wine.
With the "baseline", you can turn a multi-hour clean install of Windows (WITH all the drivers, service packs and updates) into 20 minutes or so, go straight to Windows Update and get any updates which have happened since you made the "baseline" image, create a NEW "baseline" image, (so you have all the recent updates included in your image for the future) and then reinstall just the apps you want and restore your "data" (pictures, music, etc) from the "nightly" backup. You will find that after a half year with Windows, no matter how careful you are, a clean install will run noticeably faster. (at least for another 6 to 8 months...  )
With the "nightly" you can recover from some disaster back to the condition the computer was the night before, and you don't have to worry about reinstalling all your apps or backing up and copying back your "data".
The combination of the two gives you the best of both worlds. Your "data" is always protected up to the night before in the "nightly" image, so you only lose whatever porn you downloaded since you got up this morning. The "baseline" lets you swiftly get back to a shiny new Windows install in about 1/20th of the time it normally takes.
The only time you should ever have to really do a "clean" install of Windows from scratch ever again is when you upgrade to a new version of the OS (like from XP to Vista) or significantly change your hardware (like a new motherboard and / or CPU). Windows will deal with different hard drives or a different video card and such than what is in the image pretty gracefully, but a different motherboard, chipset or cpu may have it chewing off its own arm trying to escape when you first boot up with all the wrong system level drivers and chipset drivers installed from the image.
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Sun Aug 10, 2008 4:42 pm Post subject:
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Thanks Eagle. I'll check that out.
I'd also like to add that I got a Western Digital My Book external hard drive. One of the reasons I decided on this one is because it is already in Fat32. That means all I have to do is plug into my PS3 and I have all my movies, pics, and mp3's right there. You can easily transfer them over and store them on your PS3 for use during gaming. I wish I would have made this purchase a long time ago.
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Mon Aug 11, 2008 12:14 pm Post subject:
Re: Need a fresh start |
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| DeathByMunky wrote: | I'm planning on wiping everything off of my hard drive and starting over. Some idiot was on my computer and got into a nice big batch of trojans and spy ware. I'm having trouble getting rid of it, and I have no restore points for some reason.
All I really need to do is back up my music, videos, and a few programs. If I copy these over to a data cd, will I be able to put them back on my computer with ease? How should I go about doing this? |
I can relate. I got a virus about a few weeks ago and it infected my resotre points and killed my anti virus so I had to get new. Like the previous post I had to run avg several times and spyware several times to get it taken care of....Best of Luck
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