PC Tools free Alternate Operating System Scanner allows you to boot a Microsoft Windows system with an alternate operating system on a CD. You can then scan the system for viruses from the CD, though I've found the utilitity of its anti-virus scanner to be very limited.
When I tried the virus scanning feature on a Dell Dimension 4550 PC that had Windows XP Home installed on the hard drive, the scanner didn't seem to be very effective, completing the scan in only 8 seconds and checking only 738 files out of the hundreds of thousands of files that existed on the Windows partition of the hard drive I scanned.
| Total malware files: | 0 |
| Total files: | 738 |
| Scan time: | 8 seconds |
The CD comes with a file manager that will allow you to access directories and files on your Microsoft Windows partitions on the hard drive. It also has "Disk Detonator", which will allow you to destroy partitions on the hard drive, if you wish.
You can get a shell prompt by choosing "System Shell" from the main menu, which will give you an ash shell provided via BusyBox, but the AOSS CD is lacking in standard Linux command line utilities. There is no scp nor ftp for transferring files over the network to another system. There is no links nor lynx one might use to access a web server to download or upload files. Wget and curl are also missing as are the standard network utilities such as ifconfig and netstat.
When I checked the contents of /proc/version, I saw that
AOSS uses Ubuntu GNU/Linux for the
operating system.
Linux version 2.6.39.4 (www-data@steve-aoss-ubuntu) (gcc version 4.4.1 (Ubuntu 4 .4.1-4ubuntu9) ) #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Oct 31 11:26:05 EST 2011
References:
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Bootable Antivirus and AntiSpyware Software AOSS | PC Tools
Free AntiVirus & AntiSpyware Software | PC Tools -
PC Tools Alternative Operating System AOS Freware Virus Scanner
Date: May 27, 2010
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