Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

[There's been quite a bit of interest in this post and I've expanded on it quite a bit. Please post any comments or questions to help me improve this guide. - Neil] Keith and I have both run into situations where we want to recover a Windows computer by cleaning it up with a Linux Live (bootable) CD distro. This offers several advantages to cleaning up an infected or compromised computer by booting into Windows: It prevents the malware, if it exists, from jumping from the infected computer or partition we are trying to fix to the repair partition or boot medium. If we boot from a CD, there's actually no way to alter the boot medium, since it's read-only. Naturally, we started with Knoppix -- download it here . Installing and scanning with F-Prot is covered in this Knoppix.net discussion thread, Virus Scan from LiveCD , which describes how to install F-Prot from the command line using apt-get. Also, In Knoppix 5.1, you can boot from the Knoppix CD and install F-P