Nov 10 2004

Experience with BitDefender Live CD

Published by Martin at 6:47 am under Malware

I’m in the process of trying to recover a computer for a family member. Another computer savvy member of the family got a cable modem and connected the computer directly to the Internet without any protection (anti-virus, anti-spyware, personal firewall). The system is so infected it won’t boot properly to Windows ME (no jokes please), and in Safe Mode, it can’t read the CD drives. Without the ability to read CD’s, no software installation.

I found the BitDefender LiveCD while looking for a bootable Linux image that included the ability to scan a Windows partition for viruses. While my search was not exhaustive, I didn’t find any other alternatives. If you know of one, please let me know.

I tried booting to this LiveCD on my personal system first. It identified most of the major hardware without any major hiccups and in very little time. The first problem I ran into was reading the system s NTFS partitions. BitDefender does apparently have provisions for reading a NTFS partition, but it requires additional software that did not appear to be on the CD. I have some more research to do on this point.

On the WindowsME system, boot up was much slower and the USB keyboard seemed to give the image a bit of a headache. Once the system was fully up, mounting the hard drives was very simple. Using BitDefender’s Linux virus scan didn’t turn out well though. Two attempts to scan the hard drive ended with the computer hung and in need of a reboot. On a positive note, the kernel recognized both CD drives, allowing the contents of a security CD to be moved to the hard drive of the computer.

Rebooting to WindowsME Safe Mode allowed me to install Spybot S&D and AVG Antivirus, from the folder copied while in Linux. Both programs installed successfully, albiet with slightly outdated databases. Spybot found in the neighborhood of 60 instances of scumware, and AVG found over 20 instances of viruses. Rebooting allowed both programs to finish their cleanup, but the system still isn’t booting properly.

I’m not sure what the next step is, but I think it will involve recovering any valuable files off the computer and re-installing Windows. If the BitDefender LiveCD will allow me to use the CD-RW on the computer great, otherwise I might have to slave the HD in another computer. It would probably be less work to backup everything to a DVD and re-image. And this time I can add all the security software before it ever comes close to the Internet.

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4 Responses to “Experience with BitDefender Live CD”

  1. # dilberton 10 Nov 2004 at 6:56 am

    Okay, jokes aside, what the hell are you doing using WinME anyway?

  2. # Martinon 10 Nov 2004 at 7:03 am

    It was there when they got it. The system is about three years old. If I put anything on it, it will probably be Windows 2k, or XP if I can convince them to spring for the software. Even the XP firewall would have probably saved them from about half of the current problems.

  3. # Kevan Smithon 10 Nov 2004 at 11:55 pm

    Scanning for viruses with Knoppix;

    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5118

  4. # Corneliuson 15 Nov 2004 at 12:50 pm

    My next step would probably be to figure out what programs/malware are actually starting during bootup. My personal favorite for this job is Iolo’s System Mechanic. They have a free demo version and one of the tools in their toolbox checks all the usual locations and creates a list of all of the start-up entries. You can then select individual entries and disable (or delete) them. I’ve never attempted to run it in safe mode, but it’s worth a shot. And no, I don’t work for Iolo.