what to do i am losing my mind

[iwanttolearn]

hello everyone,
I am about to lose my mind, i am trying to help my sister with these viruses and malware, and trojan things. Well first off she did not have any antivirus software on her system. So now when we turn on the system and wait for a long while, the screen is black with writing on it stating that the system is under attack from spyware, I tried to install McAfee but it would not work, so I went and downloaded PC tools spyware doctor at my house on my computer and saved it to a CD. Her internet is way slow, and now the OS is running slow also, i am not able to update the program and was trying to find out if there are any suggestions out there that I might be able to use. I have been working on this for 2 days now and don't seem to be getting anywhere.

I had actually thought about reformatting the hard drive, and at this point is that a viable option? Please help me , the sooner the better, as I told her that I would reformat the hard drive on Monday!

[Cricket]

If your computer has up to date anti-virus and anti-spyware definitions, pull the hard drive out of your sister's computer and put it in your computer and then run your security software on it until it's clean.

Cricket

[cmillar6]

if the PC is that infected cleaning it will be next to impossible. Your best bet is to format and reinstall Windows.

Reformat and reinstall windows. On your computer download AVG 7.5 Pro, SpyBot Search and Rescue 1.5 and SuperAntiware Pro, all FREE and burn them to CD then install on your sisters computer. Another free program I like and use is WinPatrol Those 4 programs will save her some headaches as long as she uses them and keeps them updated. Since she is using XP, I would also suggest a free firewall like Comodo or Zone Alarm if she doesn't have one. XP has a firewall that has good inbound protection but it has no outbound protection.

[Cricket]

If you do decide to do a reformat and reinstall on your sister's hard drive you should make sure there isn't anything on it that she wants to save. If she does have data on the hard drive and wants to save it (and didn't make any off-computer backups) you're going to have to pull the hard drive and put it in your computer to transfer the files off her hard drive. Since it'll be in your computer you can run security scan on it just to see if you clean it up...I've done this many, many times and have been able to clean up massive infections without having to reformat and reinstall Windows...the worst one had over 15,000 infected files and I was still able to clean it up (but that one took 3 days and lots of different security software to get clean).

Or you can put her hard drive in an external hard drive housing and connect it to another PC through the USB port and move her data off.

A reformat and reinstall is the last thing I would do...I normally try to clean off the infection and get the computer running normally again before I do a reformat and reinstall.

Cricket

[rjfvillarosa]

I totally agree with Cricket on this one. To me the biggest thing you are up against is damaged system files that will ruin your Windows installation.
If I were you I would try and go the USB way, it stands the harddrive just that little bit further from your harddrive than a direct IDE or SATA connection would, remember you connect the drive USB after your system is running and hopefully your antivirus software would detect anything trying to encroach on your machine from your sisters harddrive.
Once you have had a good go at cleaning the harddrive, just to be on the safe side, you could do an XP repair install, which just replaces the system files and therefore will not damage or remove any of your sisters personal files.
Try and get your sisters machine to start up before you move the harddrive to your machine and delete all the temporary internet files and cookies and also switch off system restore, this will dump all the restoration files which are known places for malware to hide, don't forget to switch system restore back on after putting the harddrive back into your sisters machine and carrying out the repair install.

[Devastator]

Can you get into safe mode to do the scans? Or at the least go in there to move the files some files across?

[Negeva]

Originally Posted by Devastator Can you get into safe mode to do the scans? Or at the least go in there to move the files some files across?

Why bother? Quicker to yank the drive to backup any and all data and then re-install Windows; that'll take the best part of a day and trying to clean that machine could take a few.

Read what rjfvillarosa and Cricket have said. With heavily infected machines not only is it time consuming but there is a very good chance that system files will be corrupt. Thus, after you've cleaned up you'll be wasting even more time fixing them.

Yank > Back-up > Nuke > Re-install.

And, for the love of all that's holy install some internet security applications - someone listed a bunch of free stuff that will help protect you.