What do you think I should do?

[ingeborgdot]

I think I have gotten my first virus ever. I was expecting a tracking number from USPS so I opened up the email and opened up the attachment. Crap is what I found. My essentials saw it but for some reason it must have slipped through. Unless it was just a freak thing and my SSD drive went at the same time. I did a restart and then a system restore and then my virus prot. said it found something again and cleaned it but needed to be restarted. When I restarted it would not restart and my SSD was no where to be found in bios. I then put in W7 and did a repair and it said it needed to do something to my startup so I did that. I then did another repair and it found the SSD but I decided before I did that I would put it in my other computer and do a virus check to clean it. Is that going to work? What do you think I should do?

 

[mechBgon]

First thing to do is copy out any personal files you don't want to lose. If you put the drive into another system, you'll probably need to know how to take "ownership" of your user profile folder: info for WinXP, same idea


Anyway, you can opt to reinstall Windows and all your stuff from scratch, or not. If you do want to reinstall Windows, you might as well do a secure wipe of your SSD if the SSD maker has such a utility.

If you'd rather stick with the repair installation, it would be a good idea to run a couple of virus scans with bootable virus-scanning CDs. Kaspersky and AntiVir/Avira have some in ISO form, just burn to discs and boot from them:

http://rescuedisk.kaspersky-labs.com/rescuedisk/updatable/kav_rescue_10.iso

http://professional.avira-update.com/package/rescue_system/common/en/rescue_system-common-en.iso

You might as well max out all detection options. For Kaspersky, do like this:

Post back with the names of whatever they find. Do you remember what your antivirus called the infection that you already detected?

 

[ingeborgdot]

It now can't even find an operating system. Everything is in tact in the SSD but it is so messed up the boot won't work and the repair disc can't find anything. I do have an image to restore it to but it is about 8 months old. I guess that will mean a lot less installing than a new install but still many hours. I ended up taking it in to the local shop because I don't have the time and I need it for serious work by Friday.