external HD

[chad7]

gosh you guys respond quick...awesome....one last thing if you dont mind.....my little cousin, who is now chained to the back fence....managed to go online and infect my desktop HD with all these programs running in the background....i think this is before i got a firewall and virus scanner and stuff...btw, the programs have a .exe at the end and use ungodly amounts of resources....might i corrupt my hopefully pristine new laptop by hooking up an old HD via firewire...thank you again!

i am aware that i can buy a product to hook up my old HD to my new laptop and, i cant neccesarily boot off of it but just use it for storage, correct? but can i corrupt the new computer using the old HD? assuming the old HD has destructive content....any insight would help.....thanks!

[ImbibedParasite]

If the old hard drive has a virus and you run the virus, then the old hard drive can mess up new computer. When the program is run, it loads the data from the old hard drive into memory, therefore into your computer. I would try to scan the old hard drive for viruses before running anything from the old hard drive.

[cheyenne1212]

If you hook up a hard drive with viruses inside, then make sure you have up to date antivirus definitions, and auto protect (norton) or whatevers its called on other AV's to automatically keep scanning.

Probably wouldn't hurt to right click the HD and let your AV do a virus scan on it before you open it up.

[sumdumguy]

here's an idea.. if you're running on a FAT partition.. and you wanna clean up quick.
since the viruses can't run if you've booted off a bootdisk, get f-prot antivirus (the free dos version)

http://www.f-prot.com/download/download_fpdos.html

you can fit the AV engine and definitions onto two diskettes.. maybe 3 now..
no install, just copy the files to a directory.. (make one called fprot under c:\)

[nihil]

Chad,

"You must be patient grasshopper"............if you do not sanitise the old HDD first, you will probably bring some of the malware onto the new machine. A lot of this stuff will see a mapped HDD and go for it.

You need to run Bot/Spyware/Trojan and AV stuff first. It needs to have the latest pattern/signature/definition files. You need to run all this stuff in SAFE MODE.

You also need to "harden" the new machine before starting any transfers.

I will get back with some suggestions, but I have to take "herself" shopping right now.............it is that time of day over here

Take care!

[dsilvaevan]

hey man unless the data is important just fdisk the harddisk
remove the partition and fdisk/mbr it ok