Some virus are very destructive or badly coded until it affects Windows stability. One of the worst thing that could happen is you’re unable to boot in to Windows and not even Safe Mode. That makes it harder for tech people to troubleshoot the problem and ended up in reformatting the hard drive to reinstall Windows. Last year I written a guide on how to clean or remove virus when you can’t boot in to Windows using Hiren’s BootCD.
However, Hiren’s BootCD only has F-Prot and McAfee dos based antivirus, which I personally think that it is not strong or smart enough to detect and remove some viruses. The only antivirus program that I can put my trust on is Kaspersky.
Good news is Kaspersky has started offering Rescue Disk to scan and remove virus on computer without the need of booting in to Windows.
Kaspersky Rescue Disk offers a safe way to remove viruses from a computer without the risk of getting infected. Boot from the Kaspersky Rescue Disk to scan and remove threats from an infected computer without the risk of infecting other files or computers. All you need to do is the download the ISO file, burn the ISO image to a CD, insert it into the infected system’s CD-ROM drive, enter the PC’s BIOS, set it to boot from the CD and reboot the computer.
Here’s the detailed step-by-step on how to use Kaspersky Rescue Disk.
1. Download Kaspersky Rescue Disk ISO.
2. Burn the ISO with your CD/DVD burning software. If you don’t have one, you can use ImgBurn. You can follow the guide on this page on how to burn ISO to a CD using ImgBurn.
3. After finished burning Kaspersky Rescue Disk to CD, insert the CD to your CD/DVD-ROM, and boot up your computer with it.
4. You will get a screen that looks like below. Hit the ENTER key to start booting the Anti-Virus using linux.
5. Once everything is loaded, the latest Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 will load. Simple check the hard drives that you want to scan and click Start scan.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 or Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 allows you to create your own Recue Disk. Open KAV or KIS, click SCAN, choose Create Rescue Disk. Just follow the instruction and you will have your own made Rescue Disk. However, the rescue disk that you create from Kaspersky is different from the one that you download from Kaspersky website. The one that you create from Kaspersky software is designed to restore system functionality after a virus attack that damaged system files of the operating system and made it impossible to startup and to be used only on the computer that it was created on. Using the disk on other computers could lead to unforeseeable consequences, since it contains information about the parameters of a specific computer.
As for Kaspersky Rescue Disk that you download from Kaspersky website, it is like an on-demand virus scanner that allows you to scan and remove virus without booting in Windows. When Windows is running, virus are active and sometimes it is tough to remove them. So the most effective way of removing virus is when they are inactive.