Trying to scan a hard drive from another system for viruses in my system.

[eno]

I am using my tester system(under My Game rigs) to scan peoples hard drives for viruses. What I have been doing is sitting my PC next their PC and just running a long IDE and Power cable to the other systems hard drive. Then let boot to my hard drive with theirs as the secondary drive to be scanned. It has worked before and saves time since this test system has nothing on it except tons of virus removal programs.

What is happening when I hook the 2nd drive up, is the BIOS detects it, windows disk managment detects it but if I try to find it under My Computer it is not there. I have seen this before when I basically was doing the same thing with my bros hard drive, all we were trying to do was take some data off it and transfer, not scan for viruses. What I had to do to allow windows to use the drive was " Conver to Dynamic Disk". I was scared to do that but once I did , it showed up in windows and I was able to transfer files over. But the reason I don't want to do that with this clients system is because it states you will not be able to use any OS on this volume once you change it over to dynamic which won't fly for the client since we need to be able to have this drive still run.

My system is XP Pro , clients is 98se.

I know there are tons of other ways to scan for viruses, thats not what I am posting for, as I type this it is getting scanned various other methods, I just want toknow if there is any way to view and allow other hard drives to be scanned in my testing system when I run into this problem. Seems XP drives scan just fine, older drives force me to change it to dynamic.

 

[1sikbITCH]

Maybe his drive is a dynamic volume already, and is already "married" to his operating system. That would be a good reason why another OS (yours) can't read it. I'm not sure you can get around that. What you can do easily enough, is mirror his volume to a blank hard drive, which you can then recreate as a dynamic drive for your own OS. At least that way you can run it thru your machine and see if it's clean, and if it is, you know the original is clean too.

 

[eno]

Good Idea but I am trying to make this a FAST process. The whole reason I am scanning with my computer is to speed up the scan time in which an infected OS takes.

 

[redbeard1]

A drive with 98 should not be converted to dynamic. That is only for XP. If your XP system can't read a 98 fat32 partition then somehow the drive is not being detected right. Is the bios set up to auto detect both the size and LBA settings? 98 has no rights that could prevent XP from reading it. I constantly pop drives in and out of my test system and I have not seen the problem you've run into.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: eno
Good Idea but I am trying to make this a FAST process. The whole reason I am scanning with my computer is to speed up the scan time in which an infected OS takes.

A virus scan doesn't take THAT long...what's he going to do, put his HD in your computer once a week for a virus scan? It's silly. Just scan it in it's native machine.

Sorry, that probably sounded cynical, but I don't see the logic in what you're doing.

XP should be detecting that drive without an issue, BTW. Something is amiss.

 

[JonathanYoung]

This might sound obvious, but you said that Disk Management detects the drive, but My Computer doesn't, so maybe you forgot to assign a drive letter to the partition(s)? I've added new drives to XP before and if I recall correctly, it doesn't always add a drive letter automatically. The reason you have to convert to Dynamic volumes to "see" the drive is probably because after the conversion, Windows adds a drive letter for you. So, you might want to try that... right-click on the partition and click on "change drive letters and paths..." Good luck!!