USB drives are incredible as they allow us to take massive amounts of storage on the go. But what do you do if you get a virus on a USB drive? In this article, we will take a look at how to remove viruses from your portable drives.
The distances that technology has come in the last 10 years are amazing. To think, we can now carry a USB drive with us that has a storage capacity in excess of 32GB. Granted, the best selling laptops all provide us with storage capacities in the 100’s of gigabytes but, often, we do not want to carry our laptops with us. We simply want to have our data with us.
And this is what makes USB drives great-we can take our data with us wherever we go. While this is a tremendous benefit, we often find ourselves putting our USB sticks in computers that we don’t know are protected with any type of virus protection. Thus, our USB drives are much more vulnerable to viruses that our laptop computers.
So, what happens if we get a virus on a USB drive? How can we remove it?
Removing a virus from a pen drive is a slightly different, and more difficult, process than removing a virus from our computer.
For example, a friend of mine, who uses his thumb drive all the time, recently reported to me that he had a virus on his USB drive and that his anti-virus program, AVG, could not remove it.
The anit-virus program was reporting “some files cannot be healed” because the virus “object(s) are located on a non-local drive.”
This often happens when you have a remote drive. There is some irony in the fact that, when you need your virus protection the most (like in this situation), it cannot help you. Typically, what is happening is that the virus program gets immediately lodged into memory when you insert your drive into the system.
In the case of my friend, this was happening because the USB drive had an infected file called “autorun.inf”.
As in many situations of this sort, there were tools available to assist with the virus removal. We found a freely available tool on the Internet called the Flash Disinfector which assists with virus removal from pen drives.
However, simply running this tool did not do the job. When you want to remove a virus completely from a USB drive, you need to download the appropriate tools and then boot your Windows computer in safe mode, which is done by restarting your computer and then pressing the F8 key before Windows starts. The reason that you boot your computer into safe mode is that this prevents the automatic loading of files which many viruses use to infect your computer.
Once you boot your computer into safe mode, you can usually completely eliminate the virus by running your anti-virus program and then running the tools that you downloaded to eliminate your particular virus.
