Advice: Virus on Win2k

[pamisano at earthil.net]

Booting to a linux distro is probably your best bet, especially if there
is a windows based virus.  I suggest knoppix-std
http://www.knoppix-std.org/ has some good tools for data recovery.  I
use it myself for the same purpose, to retrieve data from windows
machines.  Let me know if I can help.

Pete

On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 06:50, Greg Kedrovsky wrote:
> I have a machine on my LAN that must have gotten infected by a virus. My
> wife opened an e-mail yesterday that looked like it was addressed from
> me. As soon as she did, the machine locked up. She pulled the plug and
> cut the power to shut it down, then booted again. It boots into the pale
> blue Win2k screen and stops. The hdd light flickers. I'm thinkin the
> thing is hosed nicely. 
> 
> It's Win2k Pro on a Dell Latitude CPx notebook.
> 
> I would like to get as much stuff off the hdd as possible, or even clean
> it up, rather than reformatting. There are documents, address book, etc.
> on there that I'd like to save. No, no current back up exists. 
> 
> I've tried booting from my install disk and doing repairs. Nothing
> works. I slept on it last night, and this morning I had a thought:
> Knoppix. I have never used Knoppix before, so I would a bit of a
> learning curve to climb. But, would I be able to boot Knoppix (BIOS
> allows CDROM booting), mount the hdd and transfer any and all info I
> want to my server via a pcmcia lan card? 
> 
> Or, if that's not the solution, does anyone have any ideas. 
> 
> If I don't get back to you soon, it's because I'm not in the office
> today. I'm buggin outta here early to get to the other side of town for
> some charity work we're doing this week.
> 
> Thanks, guys, for the help.
> 
> -Greg