When viruses attack!!!

Hi everybody!

I've got a 500gb external hard disk infected by a boot.mebroot virus, I've tried to take it off with norton power eraser and now I've got two boot.mebroot viruses!!! I've also tried to format the whole thing but they didn't go away.

My question is: can I put that hard disk in a linux pc (in this case the rasPi)? will it cancel the virus or not reading it at all?

Hi,

You'll probably have to do a low level format to get rid of mebroot, as it infects the Master Boot Record.

If there's nothing you want to keep on the disk, best thing would probably be to wipe it with DBAN - http://www.dban.org

Whilst the virus code almost certainly won't run on the R-Pi, connecting the disk up to a Linux PC won't magically make the virus go away...

Hope this helps,

Rob

The worst (and probably only damaging) virus you could get on the 'pi would be one that blows the overvolting fuse.

you can get antivirus boot cds from almost any antivirus software developer if you boot from that cd it will try to erase every virus on the scanned disk

get a liveCD linux see for e.g. ubuntu

then poke at the MBR

then you will be fine

thanks everybody for the answers, I'll try the dban thing

Bit late in responding but...

If it's a SATA disk manufactured after 2001 then it will have a built in command set that will erase the disk. This includes areas of the disk that DBAN is unable to write to such as special areas that manufacturers use to store system rebuild information. Have a look at Secure Erase from the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) which is one such utility that can execute the command to erase the disk.