The very mention of the word “virus” can invoke horrible visuals – the crashing of your computer, losing your data and worse still, having your personal information shared with someone at the other end of the globe or even down your street, and losing your identity on the whole. There are some viruses that cause computers to crash when you reboot them. If this happens you might be in a fix because it would seem that you have no way out. Well, here is where an Ubuntu Live CD comes to the rescue. The Ubuntu Live CD should have a virus scanner with it, such as Avast, Avira, Panda, F-PROT, ClamAV, NOD32, Kaspersky or BitDefender. For the purpose of understanding how to get your computer up and running, the following tips to scan your PC will consider the use of Avast.
Getting Started With Scanning Your PC
To begin with, you will need the Avast! Antivirus as well as a 32-bit Ubuntu Live CD. The 64-bit CD will not work and therefore you need to downgrade to a 32-bit CD.
Load the Ubuntu Live CD and once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open up Firefox. You will find the icon for Firefox in the top panel. Open the URL: http://www.avast.com/linux-home-edition. You will find a “Download” tab when the page opens up. The DEB package can be downloaded from here. Save it to the default location as prompted by your computer. Wait for the Avast! package to download and meanwhile fill in the registration form for the trial version of Avast!
After Avast! has been successfully downloaded, click on Applications, which you will find at the top left of the screen. Expand the “Accessories” menu and open a terminal window by clicking on “Terminal”. Type out the following commands in the terminal window for Avast! to be installed on Ubuntu Live. Be sure to hit “Enter” after each of the following lines.
cd Downloads
sudo dpkg –i avast*
sudo dpkg –i avast*
These commands will shift focus to the “Downloads” folder which would have been the default location in which your file was saved, and will execute files that begin with the phrase “avast”.
The next thing you need to do is to ensure that the latest virus database is incorporated with your copy of Avast! Do this by typing out the following command in the terminal window. Hit “Enter” once this is done:
sudo sysctl –w kernel.shmmax=128000000
On successful execution of the above command, click on “Applications”. Under the “Accessories” menu item, click on “Avast!” Since this is the first time that you are running the program, you will be asked to enter the license key. Enter the license key that you would have received by e-mail when you filled in the registration form for the trial version of Avast! If you notice that the virus database is not up to date, just click on “Update Database” and wait for it to get downloaded.
Mount your Windows hard drive to be scanned by clicking on “Places” and choosing your hard drive which has Windows. If you are confused, keep checking all the drives till you find the right one. The Windows drive will show up on your desktop after this. On the Avast! Antivirus screen, navigate to the location of the Windows drive by clicking the “+” button beside the list box and then browsing to it. You can then choose to scan the entire drive or just a particular folder.
You can delete or quarantine any viruses that are found. Once the scan is complete, close Avast, remove the Ubuntu Live CD and reboot your computer.