I am helping a friend set up his new Dell 4550.

As part of the set-up, he wants to use the hard-drive from his old Compaq as a second drive in the new Dell-it's a Maxtor- so far no problem.

Here's the problem-the old HD is infected with around 14 viruses-my pal is not big on machine maintenance. I have told him to throw out the old drive, but he insists it contains files he must have.

Is there anyway I can install the old drive and run Norton 2003 on the disk to eliminate the viruses? Since the old drive contains the OS, Win XP, he used to run on his Compaq, is there a chance his Dell might boot from the old disk and carry the viruses into the new machine?

He was going to copy the files he needed to CD on the Compaq; but his optical drives were both inoperable-probably due to the viruses.

Still think he should take a hit and chuck the old disk; thought I would check here first to see if anyone knows a way to beat the problem.

Thanks, 60

Welcome to the forum sixty.

Is the hard drive still in the Compaq ? If so clean it out from there and only leave the files he *has* to save.

Hi Bulldog-Thanks

Let's say Welcome Back! Have been a member since nearly day 1 of the "old" forum-had to re-register as my old p'word didn't work anymore.

Drive is sitting on my friend's desk, with my threat of dire consequences if he decides to try to install it himself!

I can replace it in the Compaq, attach old monitor and keyboard and, I hope, get it to boot. Assuming I can, how do I get rid of the files he doesn't want? Is it possible to erase everything else, including the OS? If that will work, can I check the keeper files in the new Dell with Norton before they are opened? (there is no anti-virus on the Compaq). He wants to keep e-mail files, which you know, are notorious bug-carriers!

60

Hi 60,

Yes, Welcome back is better. We all had to re-register, Steve got himself a new server.

If you can get the old thing to boot and it can be connected to the internet, send those e-mail files he wants to save out to a hotmail account. You can retrieve them later and scan them. Then format the drive.

Engmus has some excellent advice there as well if you can get connected to the net.

If you have difficulty doing an online scan, seems to me that just attaching the old drive to the Dell on say the second IDE channel and running Nav should work.  The BIOS won't boot from the old drive unless you change the boot order.  The viruses on the old drive will not have a chance to do their thing unless they're executed and I can't see how that can happen if the first thing you do is scan with Nav.  Bulldog's suggestion of deleting unwanted stuff on the Compaq beforehand would be a sensible precaution.

Scotty-

That's the solution I had in mind as well. My only concern was that the machine would boot from f:\; must agree with you that this isn't really a problem.

Thanks to everyone for your responses!

60

Far from thinking it wasn't a problem, its a very real and difficult puzzle to avoid corruption from one system to another while trying to transfer files.

Keep us informed of progress.

PS BTW, what's F: - you never got to tell us of the partitions and IDE connections which might be relevant?