The antivirus vendor Avira offers a free rescue CD which allows you to boot a system that runs Microsoft Windows from a Linux rescue CD that contains Avira's antivirus software. The Avira AntiVir Rescue System can be used in cases where a system is so badly infected it won't boot into Microsoft Windows properly or when the system runs abysmally slowly due to malware present on the system.
The Avira AntiVir Rescue System v3.7.16 uses
ISOLINUX to boot from
the CD. It appears to be based on
Debian GNU/Linux judging by
the contents of /etc/proc/version.
root@RescueSystem:/# cat /proc/version Linux version 2.6.35.1 (cgossenberger@lx-i386-gc236) (gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)) #1 SMP Thu Aug 12 13:33:53 CEST 2010
At the AntiVir Rescue System download page, you can download an iso file from which you can burn a CD, if you already have CD burning software that can write ISO files to CDs, or you can download an exe file from the Avira download page and use it to create a bootable rescue CD containing the Avira antivirus software.
When I scanned a system with an Avira AntiVir Rescue System CD today, which I had previously scanned with 5 other rescue CDs and 3 antivirus/antispyware programs within Microsoft Windows, the Avira antivirus software still found 2 remaining infected files.
Avira / Linux Version 1.9.152.0
Statistics: Directories...........: 15710 Archives..............: 3143 Files...............: 312237 Infected...........: 2 Renamed...........: 2 Warnings............: 3 Suspicious..........: 0 Infection.............: 2
Avira puts a .vir extension on infected files it renames. So if an infected file was named badfile.avi, when it is renamed it will be badfile.avi.vir.
When the scan completed, I saved the results of the scan in rescue-system_scan.log, which I was able to transfer to another system with scp.
You can get a shell prompt by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F2 or selecting "Miscellaneous" from the GUI interface and then selecting "Command line". You can return to the GUI interface by hitting Alt-F7.
I hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a shell prompt and used scp to transfer the log file to another system.
