Will scanning a HDD hooked up externally to another PC remove viruses as well?

[mikel833]

Hi,

If I have a heavily infected OS and I hook it up to a working PC as an external drive and scan it, will the viruses be removed and found as well as if it was scanned directly from the infected OS?

Thanks

 

[darroll]

Depends how smart the viruses are.
Some turn off the anti-virus program.

 

[dude_56013]

It depends. Darroll is a bit confused since the viruses won't actually be active since you won't be RUNNING off that drive. To change things around a bit from what darroll said, it would depend on how good your A/V program is. Some will only catch viruses that are currently running in memory (i.e. running the drive the viruses are on). I would try Avast, MBAM, SpyBot S&D, and Ad-Aware...in that order.

 

[AntiStealth]

Yep
The Virus will be Gone.

 

[Celegorm]

Odds are you will get a fair few off, but you hardly ever get them all gone like that. Usually all that ends up doing is removing enough to allow you to go back in and run more scans from within windows to clear out the rest.