Swapping hard drive - viruses

[dragon2309]

Right y'all, well mainly Buzz actually, since he is the security expert around here.

Ive got a friend coming round in a few days with a PC that has been connected to the net (2Mbps DSL if it matters) for around 3 years with absolutely NO protection, no adware blocker/detecter, no spyware combat, no AV and no service packs on her WinXP home machine, to make it even worse she hasnt even done a Windows Update, EVER, not once in the PC's life.

As you can expect the PC is pretty crapped up right now. Im figuring that a full low level format will do the trick, BUT, she wants most of her data and docs and photos off of it first, now im thinking this could take a long time on a system taht is running like its an old 286 or something.

So, im thinking i can just take her HD out, set it to slave, connect it up to my Pri Slave IDE and BINGO, get the stuff off, burn to a couple CD's and then format away. What im worried about is my own HD gettin infected and ruined, what im saying is that, can viruses travel through to my original main HD with it connected and constant data transfer going on.

What are the risks, if any??

Thanks everyone, she could be here as early as tomorow so a quick reply would be nice.

Thanks, dragon2309

 

[Byteman]

Generally speaking you'd be ok. I put my usb flash drive in many infested computers every night and I have never had anything bad hop on over to it. I also have backuped HD's onto a clean computer like your going to do, with no cross infections. Spyware stays on the drive it's installed to, viruses gerally do the same. Having said that, a few words of caution...

1. If your AV scanner is running, when you copy files that are infected, your AV may pop up and kill your burn. You should do a full AV scan of her HD, once connected to your machine,... then burn the files.

2. There are some older viruses that, if active, will randomly delete all .exe files they can find, (ex: Nimda).

3. When you make a backup of her files, odds are you'll be put malware on the CD along with the files. So when she uses that CD on her newly reformatted machine, she better have a current and updated AV scanner installed first, also a realtime spyware scanner wouldn't hurt either (ex. MS Antispy).

 

[dragon2309]

BUMP, anyone??? It might seem like a lot of text abiove but please read it, please......

dragon2309

*EDIT* LOL, we must have submitted at like the exact sme second, lol, nevermind, thanks for the reply byteman