2 ways to Disinfect your Infected Pen Drive
By: Satbir Singh on August 8th, 2008
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As Pen Drives viruses are quite popular these days, it sometimes happens that neither the virus in the pen drive gets deleted even after showing hidden files in Windows Explorer nor it lets format the pen drive using normal Format Pen Drive option in Windows Explorer.
Usually the virus sits in pen drive and runs automatically when you attach the pen drive and will prevent anything from running which may remove it.
But there are two ways which i found to get rid of this problem. Forget about Antivirus, most pen drive viruses are not caught by Anti Virus softwares.
1. Format From DOS
If you are unable to format the pen drive(of course after backing up data from pen drive) from Windows Explorer, then DOS is the way to go. Start run (Window key + R) and type cmd and press Enter.
Now type in FORMAT X: /FS:FAT32 /Q /V:PenDrive, Replace X with the drive letter of Pen Drive and press Enter, this should format your pen drive and the virus would be gone.
2. Use a Linux Box
Other solution to the infected pen drive is view the contents of pen drive using a Linux System. As most of the viruses affect Windows PC’s, it is very unlikely that pen drive virus may be effective on any Linux system. When you’ll view the contents of infected pen drive from Linux Box, you’ll be able to spot the virus and delete it permanently. I used this technique to disinfect pen drive of my friend using Ubuntu.
(Thanks for the tip: Simar)
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Some more ways.
Use Free Commander, This prog has the capability to show the files which windos cannot. Migrate to the root of the pen drive. Usually there is an autorun.inf file. Open in note pad.here you get to know the name of the exe file this will execute. Start regedit. Delete all the regs with that name. Come back to the pen drive through Free Commander. You will be able to delete the exe and inf file. I have tried this many time. Hundred percent secessful. I have done it remove maskrider, Driveguard.exe etc
@Dr. Hamid
Thanks for increasing our knowledge
nice post i ever thought of using ubuntu, although i love having viruses and trying to remove them.
another trick i use is if u have installed windows media player 10(not 11) u will have option of opening pen drive as portable media device, using this we can view all files( and if hidden and system files are on that too will be shown) but no file can b executed by itself nor even by u if u try, to run an exe file from it we have to copy it on hard disk. surely very useful where u can see all files open autorun by copying and delete all suspicious files.