Live CD-based antimalware #

A mixed bag at best:

See also SOS - Anti-virus Rescue Disks to the rescue and Bootable rescue CDs can fix your damaged Windows. Note that these reviews are from last year; the products seem to have changed rather markedly since then.

Microsoft's Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, also known as DaRT (and which is built on Winternals Administrator's Pak / ERD Commander 2005), is a bootable CD which includes "Standalone System Sweeper". Definition updates can be found here or downloaded from within the program. It has been the most effective bootable antimalware tool I've found. Microsoft TechNet subscribers can download DaRT as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

UPDATE 1: Standalone System Sweeper's definition updates (whether from the network or local storage) no longer seem to work on Windows XP systems. The AVG Rescue CD has worked well for me, though it failed to uncover an MBR infection which was causing a BSOD (0xBA4C7524,0xC000034,0x00000000,0x00000000). Running fixmbr from the Recovery Console did the trick. Also had to manually remove evil DNS servers (93.188.164.33 and 93.188.160.103) from network adapters.

UPDATE 2: Standalone System Sweeper now available free to all on a pre-built WinPE image!

/windows | Jun 24, 2009


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