Live CD for Virus Removal/Registry edits etc

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CraiGDaniel

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Just starting out hoping someone can shed some light on this for me.

On occasion i find myself with a HDD that needs to be scanned for viruses, registry cleanup.. you get the idea.

What i want to know is can i use a bootable live cd to boot a hdd that i have connected to a workshop computer via external enclosure and get on with the tasks i need to do, and then return the HDD back to it's original hardware?


Will this have any side-effects on the HDD when it returns to its original tower and hardware all new and shiny?
 
that depends on what you mean by "effect".

you can do that... many of us do it all the time...

just don't do things you don't intend to do...

"oh no i formatted customer n's hard disk!"
 
I think I understand what you're asking and yes, you should be able to hook up a client's hard drive to your machine, run your live cd, and be alright. You may need to be careful though, for example, when doing virus removals, if a system file gets removed then the operating system may not boot when you put the drive back.
 
iisjman07 said:
I think I understand what you're asking and yes, you should be able to hook up a client's hard drive to your machine, run your live cd, and be alright. You may need to be careful though, for example, when doing virus removals, if a system file gets removed then the operating system may not boot when you put the drive back.
Click to expand...

yeh you got it right.

Do you have any tips to make sure a virus/malware scanner doesn't delete a system file or is it one of those things that can just happen?

Last thing i want is to return a hdd and not have it boot up !
 
CraiGDaniel said:
yeh you got it right.

Do you have any tips to make sure a virus/malware scanner doesn't delete a system file or is it one of those things that can just happen?

Last thing i want is to return a hdd and not have it boot up !
Click to expand...

when/if it happens then you just pop in a known good version of that system file
 
CraiGDaniel said:
Just starting out hoping someone can shed some light on this for me.

On occasion i find myself with a HDD that needs to be scanned for viruses, registry cleanup.. you get the idea.

What i want to know is can i use a bootable live cd to boot a hdd that i have connected to a workshop computer via external enclosure and get on with the tasks i need to do, and then return the HDD back to it's original hardware?


Will this have any side-effects on the HDD when it returns to its original tower and hardware all new and shiny?
Click to expand...

I don't understand why you want to use a "live" cd if you are already attaching the hard drive to your tech bench PC... doesn't your tech bench PC already have an OS on it with which to manipulate the customer's OS on the attached drive?! LOL

You should only need to use a "live" cd if you are need to boot into a different OS while the customer's HDD is in their OWN PC.

Am I missing something here?
 
Well if you used a live cd on your test bench on a heavily infected HD you are less likely to get infected yourself. I ran into this over the weekend when making an image of a customers infected drive. I was doing the image from within Win XP with the infected drive slaved to mine. Using Drive Image. While copying I received several notifications of infected files being stopped. Maybe I wouldn't have been infected and it only stopped them because my AV recognized them. Maybe they weren't trying to actually run.
 
The idea of the live imagin was so i could have a real-time UI whilst working on the HDD instead of ploughing through the folders of the drive as well as the reduced infection risk for my bench pc.

Not too clued up on live cds but i think this is how they work? Provide a real time operating system without altering the system/os files on the HDD???
 
adam_chevyss said:
Well if you used a live cd on your test bench on a heavily infected HD you are less likely to get infected yourself. I ran into this over the weekend when making an image of a customers infected drive. I was doing the image from within Win XP with the infected drive slaved to mine. Using Drive Image. While copying I received several notifications of infected files being stopped. Maybe I wouldn't have been infected and it only stopped them because my AV recognized them. Maybe they weren't trying to actually run.
Click to expand...

Never worried about this - I used to run backups by booting the imaging CD I'm using, backup to external then used whatever else I need. Now I backup within windows, do whatever I need to then scan my own system each night. It's connected to WHS so gets backed up every night. I can always go back upto a month if necessary. So far I've never had a problem connecting infected drives to it. Luckily !!


www.tornadopc.com
 
adam_chevyss said:
Well if you used a live cd on your test bench on a heavily infected HD you are less likely to get infected yourself. I ran into this over the weekend when making an image of a customers infected drive. I was doing the image from within Win XP with the infected drive slaved to mine. Using Drive Image. While copying I received several notifications of infected files being stopped. Maybe I wouldn't have been infected and it only stopped them because my AV recognized them. Maybe they weren't trying to actually run.
Click to expand...

They weren't trying to execute all by themselves, unless you were trying to execute them ;) I've never received an infection from a client PC that way...

The only infection point I would worry about is viruses that spread via network with a client PC booted up to it's own OS and plugged into your network... but I don't worry about that either thanks to my DDWRT based router - a topic for another thread.

CraiGDaniel said:
The idea of the live imagin was so i could have a real-time UI whilst working on the HDD instead of ploughing through the folders of the drive as well as the reduced infection risk for my bench pc.

Not too clued up on live cds but i think this is how they work? Provide a real time operating system without altering the system/os files on the HDD???
Click to expand...

Not too sure what you mean by real-time UI or rather, what you think is different about a WinPE based CD from your own OS...

...But yes that is how a "live" cd works. That is also how your tech bench computer works if you just used the OS already installed on it.

I only point this out because booting to the actual OS on *my* tech bench computer is WAY faster than booting to a WinPE based boot disk, and you can do everything you could do from a boot disk - in fact far more.

But to each his own...
 
I was always told that you can't/shouldn't load another HDD with an OS installed by another computer into your own computer with different hardware, is this not the case?
 
The problem with taking a hard drive away for scanning is when you remove the viruses you don't get a feel for how the operating system is running until you fit it back in the computer. Removing the viruses is a small part of the job, getting the OS fully functioning and tuned is another matter.
 
Slave the Customer's Drive

What we are trying to say is SLAVE your customer's hard drive in your Tech Bench computer and boot normally to your Tech Bench's OS. The customers hard drive will show up as another drive in your OS and you can scan it with anything you have. When I plug a drive into my Tech Bench computer it always shows up as E:. I then just do whatever scanning I want to E:. Hope this makes more sense. Have a good day!

Kevin
 
I guess that's the only way. I assumed with a livecd i could get a feel for the way the customers OS was running and conduct scans within the live environment without actually booting it off my tech pc os.

New to the whole livecd situation so apologies if what i'm saying is a bit stupid :confused::confused:
 
CraiGDaniel said:
I guess that's the only way. I assumed with a livecd i could get a feel for the way the customers OS was running and conduct scans within the live environment without actually booting it off my tech pc os.

New to the whole livecd situation so apologies if what i'm saying is a bit stupid :confused::confused:
Click to expand...

I think your confused a little bit and now I'm confused. You won't be booting off your customer's hard drive in your tech pc. Your connecting it to your tech pc as second hard drive. It will just show up as another drive letter in your tech pc os. In windows you can throw anything at it that you need to do to it. A livecd is good for the same but you need to know how to use linux if that is what you plan on using. Most tech tools are made to run in windows. So that is why I boot my tech bench pc into windows, connect the drive if its usb (if connecting native then you need to connect it before you turn on your computer), then I scan the drive with my tech tools and manually do what I need to do to the drive. You can use a livecd but its best used from the computer you are working on. Hope this explains more about what we are trying to tell you. TTYL.
 
Last edited:
CraiGDaniel said:
I guess that's the only way. I assumed with a livecd i could get a feel for the way the customers OS was running and conduct scans within the live environment without actually booting it off my tech pc os.

New to the whole livecd situation so apologies if what i'm saying is a bit stupid :confused::confused:
Click to expand...

The live cd boots to its own os, and has your customers hdd as a slave drive. Just as you would boot your bench pc to its os and have the customers hdd slaved on that.

So there is no need for a live cd in that situation.

You would us a live cd to boot a machine that won't boot and repair it from the live cd's os.
 
Azz said:
The live cd boots to its own os, and has your customers hdd as a slave drive. Just as you would boot your bench pc to its os and have the customers hdd slaved on that.

So there is no need for a live cd in that situation.

You would us a live cd to boot a machine that won't boot and repair it from the live cd's os.
Click to expand...

Ahhh cleared that one up for me thanks Azz.

Is it possibly to edit the registy of the slaved drive? If so what is the simplest, quickest way?
 
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