virus boot disk for ntfs

[Denis P]

Looking for some input.
What's the best way to check a ntfs system for virus without booting the possibly infected os?
Haven't had much luck booting from a floppy or cdrom, especially on an XP system.

[Matridom]

Try booting into the command line prompt from the cdrom. then pop in your fav anti virus CD. You may also want to try to scan over network booting the CD. A good anti virus should do it.

[Gameguru]

You might try <a href="http://www.dcaccess.net/~jshiver/Web2/get/FP.exe" target="_blank">this</a>. I'm not sure that it works with NTFS but its worth a try. I've used it before on a fat partition and it was brilliant.

[Asterchild]

Denis what you may be able to do is boot the NTFS based OS to see if you can copy Mcafee or FProt folder to the HDD, then restart and boot into command prompt safe mode. From there you could go to the directory and run the exe that should scan. I do not know of an NTFS boot disk that gives you CDROM support and a command prompt like the 9X boot disks, though I have been looking. LMK if you find something out.

Ö
Mog

[firemonkey]

the problem with that is f-prot will not scan a ntfs partition, I know I have tried. I have one solution it is a bit of a pain but it works, if you use Partition Magic 7 or another close to it, convert it to fat32 than run f-prot (my choice for dos scans) it should work.

[houseisland]

Winternals' NTFS DOS Professional is a pricy but higly recommended tool. It allows you to create a DOS bootable floppy (or set of floppies) which allows access to NTFS partitions.

<a href="http://www.winternals.com" target="_blank">www.winternals.com</a>

You might be able to launch DOS CDROM drivers from a command prompt and then run the DOS executable AV program that comes on installation disks such as Norton's offerings.

If the drive is not a RAID array, the simplest and quickest solution, though, is just to pull the drive, slave it in another box with the same OS (making sure that the AV defs/patterns are up-to-date in that box) and then clean the drive from there. This solution may involve some manual cleaning of the registry for the OS on the infected drive (once it is cleaned and back home), but most AV software sites have technical info on how to manually clean things up.

If the infected drive is in a mission critical box, you should probably ghost the drive onto a spare drive in the event that things go badly awry -- you can always get back to where you started then.

[Archer]

A couple of hits that may give you some guidance.

Norton AntiVirus Command-line Scanner (NAVC)
<a href="http://www.cert.mil/antivirus/commscan_readme.htm" target="_blank">http://www.cert.mil/antivirus/commscan_readme.htm</a>

How to remove a virus from your computer when Norton AntiVirus is not yet installed

<a href="http://service2.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/docid/2000012015322806" target="_blank">http://service2.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/docid/2000012015322806</a>

[Denis P]

Thanks to all who responded.
Houseisland's way is the way I've been doing it. I was just looking for an alternative method. With XP becoming more common, we're going to see more NTFS partitions.