Question About the HDD

[furius980]

Hello!

I have an old HDD at home from a PC that I had a long time ago and I wanted to know if there would be a problem if I connected it to my current PC considering that Windows XP is installed on that HDD and that there is a suspected virus on it. It has files that I would like to recover and if you can have it as a 2nd storage.

Thanks for reading! I await your response.

 

[Aeacus]

Well, if you connect it as data drive and doesn't boot off from it, there is no worry. I've often done this very same thing, during data recovery operation for my friends and family.

Though, the virus on it could be troublesome. So, best to run full drive malware scan once you've hooked it up and it shows up in Windows. E.g MalwareBytes.

 

[furius980]

Well, if you connect it as data drive and doesn't boot off from it, there is no worry. I've often done this very same thing, during data recovery operation for my friends and family.

Though, the virus on it could be troublesome. So, best to run full drive malware scan once you've hooked it up and it shows up in Windows. E.g MalwareBytes.

Oh thank you! I had that disk there collecting dust for fear of operating system incompatibilities lol, I'll do what you tell me.

 

[furius980]

Well, if you connect it as data drive and doesn't boot off from it, there is no worry. I've often done this very same thing, during data recovery operation for my friends and family.

Though, the virus on it could be troublesome. So, best to run full drive malware scan once you've hooked it up and it shows up in Windows. E.g MalwareBytes.

Bro, it's very infected lol, what should I do now?

 

[Aeacus]

When running AV (antivirus) program, you can quarantine the infected files and then delete them via the AV program. Once that's done, run the scan again. And so forth, until scan doesn't detect any malware anymore.

Oh, if no malware is detected, restart the PC and run the scan again. Some malware is more stubborn and can come back after restart. But 2nd time around, usually, the AV program can catch and delete it.

It wouldn't hurt to run malware scan for your whole PC. Since i don't necessarily think you've gotten better in avoiding malware, given that how infected your WinXP drive is/was.