Hi,
I’m in big trouble yet again with my W98 desktop - I just switched from McAfee to avast! last week and have been very happy with the difference. However, today, after letting a friend surf God-knows-where for a few hours, I’m experiencing application and Explorer errors/shutdowns midway through an avast! 4 AV scan, an Ad-Aware scan and a WinRescue 98 restore, even from Safe Mode. Earthlink Total Access wouldn’t boot up correctly either. Finally, in Safe Mode, I managed to run a TrojanHunter scan, which showed a SearchBar.100 trojan it then cleaned.
I don’t think I’ll be able to run scans normally, but I obviously need to run an avast! AV scan if there’s a way to do it in DOS (as I used to in a pinch with McAfee VirusScan). Could you tell me how?
Thanks very much!
Put Avast for dos on a bootable CD.
Link and registry key for avast for DOS into Links in my signature. Note, the absence of an internal boot scanning feature is not a limitation of avast (or even the Home version), it’s a matter of Windows. In Windows 9x\Me you need to boot into DOS.
Sorry, Technical — my God, you are generous with your time and help! — but I’m feeling pretty stupid and brain-dead at this moment, and I can’t afford to make a mistake with my one good computer right now. So would you walk me through putting it on a CD? And then exactly what command to type to start the scan?
I’ve downloaded the “avast! 7 for MS DOS” zip file and have the key saved on notepad, as per your instructions. I assume I don’t want to actually install this version of avast! on my one still-functional computer, the laptop (which still has a different AV on it - haven’t changed this one to avast! 4 yet), so do I unzip directly to the folder for my CD burning drive and then write it to CD? After which, where does the zip file with updated DAT’s go?
Sorry, I’m just not able to think too straight tonight… And I’m freaking a bit due to having the desktop suddenly fall apart like this again, when it seemed to be in beautiful shape just last night. Whatever is going on apparently is activated during boot-up, because it’s been then that things have twice gone from seemingly perfect to a complete mess.
You can go to http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/#cdromsi and download all three required files. Follow the intructions and put the up-to-date avast! DOS in the correct folder ("cds\cdromsi\files" folder). Then write it to a blank CD-R (or CD-RW) and boot from it. Then you can run avast! DOS from the CD and scan the hard drive.
Thanks for your words. This helps me to keep helping here.
Not exactly. You said you need a DOS scanning. Maybe we can use other solutions like booting in safe mode (pressing F8 while you boot and choose the Safe Mode for booting), or a normal avast! scanning, etc.
I need more info about the virus: which file (and path) is being related as infected?