Computer Virus Question

[cdanik]

My family managed to load several viruses onto the family computer last week (Luckily I have my own computer ), and there are a TON of pictures and other important files on that computer that are not backed up.

The viruses seem to be almost "destroying" the hard drive. First it loaded a fake antivirus program that I can't get rid of on the PC. Then a couple of hard drive sectors were marked as bad by the system. Now when I try to boot up, there are several windows boot files that I are corrupted. When I was able to get on the computer, and I tried to open Task Manager or command prompt, I was told that the files were corrupted (This is likely that the virus is tricking the system to think this).

Would it be safe to use a SATA to USB cable to make the attach the hard drive to my computer to be able to copy the pictures to my computer? Or would I be risking infection on my own computer?

 

[johnb35]

If you can boot to safe mode run combofix.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix

But, as long as you have a fully updated antivirus/malware program installed on your pc its possible but not probable that your pc would become infected. The only thing to worry about would be if you were to copy over an infected file on to your system.

 

[cdanik]

I will try that combo fix. The computer is running McAfee suite, and I got a couple messages from McAfee that it had removed a trojan, but it keeps coming back.


It is pretty unlikely that a picture is an infected file, right?

 

[johnb35]

Pictures, highly unlikely.

 

[cdanik]

Thank you for your help. I'm running the recovery option from windows to recover a corrupted boot file, then I will run combofix. If I am unable to remove the threats, I will attempt to use my SATA to USB cable and HOPE that my computer doesn't become infected. I didn't include the viruses in my last post, so here are the viruses that McAfee found were HTML/FakeAV trojan and dnschanger.r trojan.