eSecurityPlanet: How to Remove Malware (part 2): Booting from a CD

June 16, 2009
By Michael Horowitz

In the first part of this article I made the case that scanning for malicious software (malware) is best done from outside the infected operating system. This negates whatever defenses the malware may have, by not letting it run at all.

We treat the C disk as a data disk rather than as a bootable system disk. The downside, however, is that this approach is harder than simply installing anti-malware inside the infected system and letting it scan away.

One approach to scanning from outside the infected system is to remove the infected hard drive and connect it another computer. But there is a simpler way to accomplish the same thing: boot the infected computer from an operating system on a CD or USB flash drive. This lets us treat the infected hard drive as a data disk without moving it or touching it.

Many Linux distributions can boot and run from a CD or USB flash drive, but my preference is to use a CD-resident copy of Windows. One reason is that anyone with an infected computer is running Windows and thus they are already familiar with it.

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