Scanning flash drive(s)

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

How can I set Avast Home to scan flash drives I keep plugged in?

I checked the control box and it appears it will scan CD/DVD, but I cannot find where other media can be scanned.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks,

2

avast! doesn’t support auto scan for USB flash drives when you insert them into PC.
You can scan such USB drives on-demand as normal HDD scan (or create autorun.ini on these USB drives).

Since USB flash drives are quite slow, we don’t intend to support auto-scan – Standard shield provider (in default settings) will scan any file that is executed (or opened), so you’ll be protected. Usually, only some files are used when you insert USB key into PC, so auto-scan of all files would take quite a while.

…or have a look at this page (USBVirusScan): http://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/usbvirusscan/

3

This works great… saved me from infected USB drivers more than once :wink:

4

Thanks for your responses. I just left AVG8.0 after having been an avid AVG user for many years (10+). I never realized how it bogged down the system until coming to Avast (LOL); however, I was used to being able to scan my flash drives with that program. The reason I left was because of no rootkit protection and if I’m correct, Avast offers that protection with the free version.

I scan everything anyway before I ever put it on a flash drive so don’t think it would be a problem not to accomplish that task anymore; however, I’ll take a look at the link you provided and see how it goes.

I appreciate your help.

5

Yes the anti-rootkit is a part of the free Home version. It runs 8 minutes after boot, to allow everything to stabilise after boot and any rootkit to be running (or it would avoid the scan). It also starts as part of the on-demand scan if you use the Standard or Thorough sensitivity.

6

avast allows it on-demand too. On-access (resident) the work is done by Standard Shield.

7

I’m still feeling my way around avast and haven’t found “resident” yet. I did find where drives can be selected however, undrer the schedule boot scan area. I haven’t tried it yet, but maybe scans can be set to be done from there – or maybe that’s just with the pay plan.

Thanks for your info.

Julea

8

The resident protection by its nature is enabled and running in the background, left click the avast ’ a ’ icon and click the Details… >> button that will display the resident Shield and their settings.

You right click the avast ’ a ’ icon and select Start avast antivirus, that runs a memory scan first and then opens the Simple User Interface, here you can do on-demand scans, there are three, Local Disks (all HDDs/Partitions), Removable Media (CD/Floppy, etc.) and Folder selection (and file/folder/partition, etc. that you select). Hover the mouse over the various icons to see the tooltip for each icon.

You can choose the sensitivity, Quick, Standard (the default) or Thorough, you can also elect to scan archives files or not (off by default).

9

I truly appreciate all the responses here. I’m learning! The latest responses answers my question about scanning flash drives. I appreciate you all. I’m enjoying avast and find it easier to use in some respects than AVG. It all just takes time to learn it.

Thanks again,

Julea

10

You’re welcome.