external hard drive virus

I don't know how to get rid of your virus. Find out what viruses you have and how to get rid of them. ClamAV (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ClamAV) or any other virus scanner (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus) could be a start for detecting the infected files, but I'm really not sure if this would be enough.

But _as long as_ this virus does not infect the bios, I recommend to physically disconnect the other drives, connect the virus drive and boot with a linux live CD (like ubuntu or http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/) to use the virus scanners of your choice. I can't see a method how the virus could spread to your other hard drives.

Yes if you could physically unplug your internal hard-drives and just bootup using a LiveCd session
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
then should be able to do antivirus scans of the device.

It sounds to me more like a hardware issue rather than a virus issue tho. Are you sure it's not just a broken peice of hardware? Could you take it to a shop or local data-recovery company and talk to them about it?

They do charge quite a lot sometimes but it's better than going around destroying machines ;)
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Search and Install clamav and clamtk (clamav GUI) with Synaptic, or just simply open a Terminal (Applications - Accesories - Terminal) and copy&paste next line:

sudo aptitude install clamav clamtk

With this you will install:
Clamav: anti-virus utility for Unix - command-line interface
Clamav-freshclam: anti-virus utility for Unix - virus database update utility
 "clamtk" . ClamTk is a GUI front-end for ClamAV.
http://clamtk.sourceforge.net/index.html

Thanks for all your efforts. Disabled the internal drive and booted up from liveCD but was unable to run a virus scan on the external drive due to error messages, so plugged it straight in and found that the virus had really destroyed the hard drive. it had created many partitions and I was unable to run a virus scan through it as it had been locked down. So.. reformatted the drive.. lost the data though. The good news is that Ubuntu wasnt affected at all by the viruses on the hard drive.. Thanks again.

Sorry to hear about the loss but i'm glad it's all working now.
I hope you have better luck in linux-land
Good luck and regards from
Tom )

Hi again :)

On a fresh install of Ubuntu i usually run through all the steps in this guide, except for the optional step
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
and then this guide can be useful for looking things up in
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromWindows

Congrats and regards from
Tom :)

Thanks Tom

> To: <email address hidden>
> From: <email address hidden>
> Subject: Re: [Question #82224]: external hard drive virus
> Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 09:07:18 +0000
>
> Your question #82224 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/82224
>
> Tom posted a new comment:
> Hi again :)
>
> On a fresh install of Ubuntu i usually run through all the steps in this guide, except for the optional step
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
> and then this guide can be useful for looking things up in
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromWindows
>
> Congrats and regards from
> Tom :)
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.

_________________________________________________________________
View photos of singles in your area. Click here
http://clk.atdmt.com/NMN/go/163036679/direct/01/