Malware, Infected - Now sleep deprived?

With so many malware and trojans floating the internet these days, it sucks to be a geek with so many non-geek friends. You've probably had this thought run around in your head. You probably have had this scenario happen more than once! You get a call, someone is pleading for your help and now your stuck with the Free Geek Sqaud sticker plastered to your forehead.

My journey this time like most gets me stuck with another one of those fake virus, microsoft security type applications. Turns ugly when in safe mode and zapps the partition table and a blue screen of death appears and re-occurs on each windows reboot.

This is a nightmare, it means that now you have to repair the hard disk. Well try this first, if you can remove the hard drive, hook it up to another PC, as a slave or in a USB enclosure. You'll need an IDE or a SATA enclosure, so check your drive before picking one up, it's probably the best $20 I've spent getting one of each has save many computers. Find out what drive letter the drive is and run a CHKDSK [drive] /f to try and fix it.

If that doesn't work for you, you can try a really great FREE raw data recovery tool at http://www.pcinspector.de/. It's a cool little tool that can help you pull off file on a corrupted partion.

Once the files are recovered or the partion is fixed, pop back in the drive and try running a Malware tool.

My Top 5 Pick list
1. Adaware
2. SpyBot Search & Destroy
3. Microsofts Malware Tool -http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx
4. HiJackThis
5. Trojan Hunter

If you have the auto restore point enabled, you could restore your system back to a time period before the Malware was installed, then run the Malware or Spyware tool to clean out any lingering files.

Getting a decent Anti-Virus Protection Program is in order to future protect your system.
Not in any particular order.
1.Network Associates -Macafee
2.Norton AntiVirus
3.Kaspersky AntiVirus.