This is more of a little story of what I spent my last week doing.

My nephew come over with 2 virus infected HDDs and asked if I was able to clear the virus. Well in the past I now see myself as lucky, but I said yes lets give it a go. I have a decent commercial virus checker that is up to date and also my boot drive was recently backed up incase of problems.

My system has 12 internal HDDs (well inside a custom made box with fans) powered with it's own power supply and on/off switch. So for this I turn off the power saves me having to unplug all the drives, So only the boot drive is powered from the PC.

Guess who forgets to turn the power off to the drives after plugging in the infected drives, I must have been on another plannet at the time. Shortly after the system started Windows forces a scan on the drive, finding many badly linked files and so on, then when Windows start the virus program gives warnings all over the place and soon the virus checker crashed. Quick solution was turn off the power to the drives, unplug the infected drives, put in a DVD with a ghosted backup of the boot drive.

Confident enough there was no virus at this point I plug just one drive in and windows does a force scan at boot time, so I know it either didn't respond nicely to being powered off or a virus started its path of destruction.

Not willing to lose over 5TB of data I used the available tools I had here to recover data. This is what I did :

1st I had to buy another HDD to the size of the largest HDD in my system (this was a 750gb drive).
2nd Boot Linux Live CD
3rd Mount the infected drive (using the force option because the OS requested windows to scan the drive)
4th Format the new drive with NTFS partition. (not ext3, read on to find out why)
5th Use linux to file copy everything to the new drive (this allowed me to see if there was errors, in this case none).
6th issue a command in linux to zero fill the old infected drive: $ dd if=/dev/zero of=dev/hdd bs=1M
7th Boot Windows (after zero'ing the boot drive and using the backup once again)
8th Repartition the old drive and copy the files back on to it, this allowed the virus checker to scan all the files.

I repeated this process on all of the HDDs, took a week all up because I wasn't in a hurry. After all this I now decided to use a old laptop I have to scan peoples hard drives plugged in to a caddy.

With over 900,000+ files only infected ones found where on my nephews drives, my drive didn't get any infected files, so I conclude that turning the power off cause the problem of them not being shut down in windows.

It was a hard but interesting lesson, at least now I have a spare 750gig drive to add to the 12 drives already in there, what do I put on it now.

I've only got one thing to say....

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

Well that is a welcome download. Lets hope I don't need to use it again soon.

Always handy to keep lying around for emergencies though

Did you try to boot into safe mode and use an alternative anti virus say something like nod32?

What do you store on this machine of yours? I hate to think....... lol