Thinking about paying someone to scan my old hdd

My old 2.5 HDD has a nasty virus on it. When I tried booting up my old laptop with the infected HDD inside, it would ask me to pick a profile (even though I had it set to log into windows automatically) and then it would start load the wallpaper, and then go right back into the profile selection.

I have it in an external enclosure and was going to hook it up to my friends old laptop and scan it with Avira, Malware Bytes, and one of my friends' antivirus programs. But it seems like everytime I've used one of these to remove a virus in the past, the computer has still run really slow and jittery and the only thing i can do to fix it is re-format.

I really don't wanna get that virus on my new laptop, and I want to be sure that it's gone when I recover my files off of it so I'm thinking of paying De-Bug It (a computer repair/maintenance shop) scan it for me for 40 or 50 bucks. I was just wondering what any of the more experienced users thought about having someone else clean my old hdd.

 

if you have it in an external enclosure hook it to a machine and run the online scanner from ESET.COM on it TWICE.

if you need more assistance and cant find anyone close to you do do it let me know and I can do it here .. no charge just pay shipping for the drive both ways

 

Turn off AutoPlay before you connect the infected external drive.

 

or hold down the shift key during hookup and for 15 seconds afterwards

 

You can buy an 2.5" external enclosure and scan yourself. It usually only cost $10.

 

OP already has one

 

Here's why this MIGHT NOT work.

It really depends on the shop and their level of expertise.

Antivirus programs and most malware programs work from the concept of definition files. If the program is aware of the virus/malware, it can clean it.

More elaborate viruses/malware have randomly named files that will not be picked up by a typical scan.

Another problem. Some anitivirus and malware programs use heuristic detection, which is usually based on behavior. That means, the programs starts from a known database of files and behaviors and detects things outside the normal behavior and alerts you or cleans the computer. Because the infection on your harddrive is typically only active when the OS is running (see swarmer's caveat above on drive root autostart malware), this kind of detection will not find the problem.

Finally, the one thing all malware has in common is that it needs to be started to do what ever it was intended to do. Malware starts in a variety of ways, but most of the time it starts as a result of a setting in the registry. If you remove a drive and scan it in another computer, the only clue as to the location of the malware may be in the registry. Since most anti-malware programs do not do offline registry scans, they will often fail to find the infection and the infection settings.

So, the question is, how good is De-Bug It?

If they told you to bring your drive and they will scan it as you described, they are either very good or full of crap. I say full of crap because of the reasons listed above.

Now, if they are very good, they might very well do an offline registry scan, but I can tell you it is a heck of a lot easier to actually start an infected computer, analyze it, and THEN take the drive out and do an offline cleaning.

Doing it all offline as you describe in the first post means there is a far greater chance you will miss something during the cleaning. It also takes far longer because you have to check every conceivable way a malware infection can start rather than just seeing where the infections are during analysis and removing them