Transfering files from an infected machine?

General Topics
1

The motherboard on my friends computer (windows millennium) has bust. She’s buying a new XP machine, but she has asked me to transfer some data from the two old hard drives from her old machine to the new one.

I know for a fact that her old machine was absolutely pickled with every kind of crapware and so I’m a bit nervous plugging these old drives into the new machine in case something nasty get copied across.

Any safe way of doing this?

PigDog

2

Note: The old machine won’t even boot up, so I can’t disinfect it first.

3

Probably the safest option would be to install the drives as a slave {you will probably have to change the jumper pins to slave} in another suitably protected system (regular image backup {of the master drive} taken before cleaning slave drive and restore original image after cleaning).

Then you can scan the slave drive without it being the active/boot drive so you should be able to clean it without too much problem. You can also scan it with the usual anti-spyware tools. Once as clean as possible data transfer should be safer/easier.

4

Thanks for the reassurance. I’m going to install AV and scriptblocker in the new machine before I do anything so I guess it should be alright. Then like you say, scan the old drives with all the usual apps.

5

My best advice is to get one of the dick imaging backup tools (I still use Drive image 2002 weekly) there are others, you need one that is compatible with XP and probably one that doesn’t require the installation of .net framework as some of the newer ones do (Drive Image 7 the last before takeover by Symantec).

The only reason I mention this is that .net framework is not a default part of XP (it wasn’t when I originally installed XP Pro with SP1).

This way if they ever have a total disaster restore the last image and at worst you lose 1 weeks worth of updates, etc. But you have to also be doing regular daily backups of data files, .doc, .xls, emails, addressbook, favourites, etc. so you should only lose at worst 1 days worth of volatile data.

6

If it is useful, from version 9 of Norton Ghost (or Systemworks 2005), the .net framework is mandatory for backups :wink: