Sager 5793 laptop. In safe mode, Avast found win32:autorun[wrm]. deleted worm, left 497 files unreadable cyclical redundancy. Clean-up instructions said to install and run AVG8 to double check. Didn’t find virus, but found the unreadable files. Now computer won’t boot at all. Sager said to remove hard drive, put in external enclosure (SATA) and try to retrieve unaffected files. The only file which shows on the drive is $AVG8.vault$ containing 30 files with names like V_00000001.fil 1.06 MB total. This drive’s properties read capacity 186 GB. 85.2 GB used. I really need to retrieve as many of these files as possible as they contain free lance graphics projects and our income tax data (deadline tomorrow!!!) Our house was hit bu two tornadoes a year ago, so my back-up schedule fell to the wayside during the moves. PLEASE HELP!
Welcome to the forums, bhudson75. 
This is a terrible situation you are in. 
While I can not help, I hope someone else here will be able to offer help for you.
[s]Maybe try a rescue CD- they should allow you to copy files to a clean drive- USB maybe. I haven’t tried them myself, but this is what they claim. You could give them a try.
Rescue CD’s. Download and burn the disk image on an uninfected computer. Boot the infected computer from the disk and run a virus scan (after updating virus definitions if this option is present).
Kaspersky Rescue Disk
AntiVir Rescue CD
Bitdefender Rescue CD
F-Secure Rescue CD[/s]
EDIT: Ooops, sorry. I see you’ve actually removed the HD and tried to read it in another computer, in which case my advice won’t help.
Can you run AVG on the infected computer? If so, you might be able to extract the files from the Virus Vault.
If you’re reading the HD from another computer, if you install AVG on that computer, you might be able to decrypt the virus vault file. (You’d have to uninstall any existing AV first.)
I attached the laptop hard drive externally to a desktop, installed avg 8.5 and scanned the hard drive. I recognized the missing files within the virus vault as it scanned, but was unable to get the program to choose that virus vault rather than the default on the c drive in order to retrieve the files. I thought of renaming the c drive virus vault and moving 86 gb vault from the e drive to that location, but the c drive is only 80 gb, so that won’t work! Does anyone know if there is a way to direct the program to find the vault on another drive? There is also an internal D drive that does have room. Would it make a difference whether the vault is located on an internal or external drive?
In reply to freewheelinfrank, the whole operating system is also in the vault, so the computer doesn’t boot up when the hard drive is in the laptop. That’s why the sager people told me to access the drive externally from another computer. They weren’t able to help with AVG problems.
Tried renaming the default virus vault file and placing a shortcut to the vault on drive e in the same folder as the default vault. This didn’t work as AVG seems to know the default no matter what it’s named, and even when this file was moved to another drive, found it and defaulted to that one. The new drive for the Sager should arrive Friday, and is 500 gb, so I will try moving the 86 gb virus vault to that drive.