To remove a virus today from your computer can be a real challenge, and as anti-virus software has become better viruses have also evolved making virus removal much harder, they can now protect themselves hide, and then re-infect your pc when you think it’s clean.
remove a virusMuch of the time we will usually just rebuild a computer rather than spending too long with virus removal.
Common Types of Virus to cause major problems
The two main types of virus I’ve come across recently that seem to be the hardest to remove are the root kit type which can actually modify your operating system causing permanent damage, and the security virus which actually looks like an antivirus product itself.
Virus removal
If a virus is active on your computer and your chosen antivirus cannot remove the virus, or it removes it, but before long your computer is infected again this really means in either sense that the root of the virus has not been removed.
The best and most reliable way I have for persistent virus removal is to run a virus scan on a non running operating system, this has a number of advantages such as.. The virus is not active so it cannot protect itself or hide, and can be easily removed.
How to remove a virus from a non running system
To use this method to remove a virus you can either
Create a boot CD or USB pen drive using the Hirens emergency repair disk using another computer, then boot the infected computer from this, using the network mode scan the hard drive using an external scanner.
The other method, which I personally use for stubborn virus removal is to remove the computer’s hard drive and then either install the hard drive as a slave in another computer or install in a USB caddy.
Before doing this install some good Malware/Antivirus products, I recommend running Microsoft security essentials and Malwarebytes, they will both run at the same time, run full scans on both of them, this might take a few hours, but the scan will check every file including compressed and even system restore files, and if there is anything there it will be found and removed properly.
Preventing infection and reinfection
If you find your computer keeps getting infected even after thoroughly cleaning as above don’t presume that your computer was still infected, it could mean that your computer is not able to protect itself against this type of virus.
In this case look for another antivirus or antimalware product as the one you have may not be up to the job of removing the virus.
No antivirus or antimalware software can offer protection against every single piece of Malware around, but having two of them running across a non live operating system offers the best way of spyware and virus removal.
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