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Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

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kyrathaba:
My dad's Windows XP Home Pentium-4 machine has the Conficker virus, or some variant of it.  The reason I know this is that he passed the virus on to his external hard-drive (in USB enclosure), a USB thumb-drive, and his Windows XP Home laptop. 

Long story short: we've disinfected the external HD and thumb-drive, as well as the Windows laptop.  However, the Pentium-4 desktop PC seems royally screwed.  The DVD drive seems not to be working now, so even when I put a Kaspersky 10 Rescue DC in the drive and reboot, specifying CD-ROM as first boot device, we have no luck...

Managed to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials (he was running NO anti-virus initially, hence the virus), but we're unable to complete downloading of virus-definitions (presumably the virus is interfering).  Safe mode, no luck.  And his BIOS is too old to be able to allow booting from a USB.

Summary: I cannot get at the problem in any of the usual ways.  I'm wondering if I removed the hard drive and put it in an external HD enclosure, hooked that to a PC running MSE, if we could disinfect the drive, then reinstall it in his Pentium-4 desktop PC and go from there.

Recommendations?

rgdot:
Microsoft Security Essentials can not be updated manually either? ie add updated definitions via USB key for example. There are other anti virus that can do that.

40hz:
I'm wondering if I removed the hard drive and put it in an external HD enclosure, hooked that to a PC running MSE, if we could disinfect the drive, then reinstall it in his Pentium-4 desktop PC and go from there.
-kyrathaba (September 16, 2011, 05:43 PM)
--- End quote ---

a) You could try your idea of removing it so the executables are inactive and doing the disinfect from a separate known to be secure PC. That's pretty much SOP when a disk is infected that badly.

b) Better would be just getting the data files off that drive the same way and then doing a wipe, repartation & reformat + clean install of Windows (followed by ALL the updates) and MSE. That way you're 100% sure whatever was on there is totally gone.

My inclination would be to go with option-b unless you no longer have installation media for his OS and apps. Considering the age of the BIOS on his PC I'm guessing locating them might be a problem?

Luck! :Thmbsup:


Addendum: +1 w/rgdot  :) You can download the latest 32-bit MSE definitions at this link. See KB971606 for full details. Link here.

kyrathaba:
Alright.  I've downloaded the 32-bit version, and I'll try manually providing the updated virus-defs via USB key.

Say that, for whatever reason, I wind up needing to refomat the drive and reinstall XP, but that I cannot use his CD-ROM drive.  Is it possible to install Windows on a drive that is located in an external drive case, then relocate the HDD back to the original computer?

40hz:
Is it possible to install Windows on a drive that is located in an external drive case, then relocate the HDD back to the original computer?
-kyrathaba (September 16, 2011, 07:05 PM)
--- End quote ---

Depends. You could copy the Windows install CD over onto an external HD, then boot off a Windows setup floppy and point it to use the files on the external drive for an installation in the absence of a CD drive. But you couldn't do a setup (on a different machine) to the external HD, and then put that in your Dad's machine since the hardware configuration the setup saw would be different and probably wouldn't work. It could also cause activation problems since Genuine Advantage compiles a hash code based on the BIOS, mobo, and network card (MAC address) it finds. So even if the two machines had "identical" hardware configurations, there could still be problems getting it to activate..

But tell you what...if it's just a busted CD/DVD drive that's complicating your life, I have about a dozen surplus working optical drives sitting on the shelf. And I'd be more than happy to send you one. PM a shipping address and it will be on its way pronto with my compliments.
 :) :Thmbsup:

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