How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC

When you’ve got a PC completely infected with viruses, sometimes it’s best to reboot into a 

rescue disc and run a full virus scan from there. Here’s how to use the Avira Rescue CD to clean 

an infected PC.

We’ve previously covered how to clean an infected PC using the BitDefender or Kaspersky 

rescue disks, and loads of readers have written in saying thanks, and reporting that they were 

able to clean their PC easily. Be sure and check out our previous articles on the subject:

• How to Use the BitDefender Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC
• How to Use the Kaspersky Rescue Disk to Clean Your Infected PC

Otherwise, keep reading for how it all works with Avira, a well-respected anti-virus solution.

Download and Burn the Image to a Disc

The first thing you’ll need to do is head over to the Avira site and download the latest version of 

their rescue CD—there are .exe and .ISO versions of the rescue CD available.

If you download the .exe version of the Rescue CD, you can actually use it to directly burn the 

image to a disk without any other software required. Just download, open it up, and then stick 

a disc into the drive.

If you have any problems with the integrated burning application, you can download the ISO 

instead and then use an application to burn that ISO image file to an optical disc—we prefer 

using ImgBurn, but there’s plenty of ways to burn an ISO to a disc.

Using the Avira Rescue CD to Clean an Infected PC

Once you’ve rebooted and put the CD in the drive, you’ll see a menu that lets you boot from 

the rescue system, or boot from the drive. If you don’t select anything, it’ll automatically boot

 into the rescue CD.

The first thing you’ll want to do is switch to the Update tab, and then choose Yes to apply 

the latest updates.

Now switch back over to the Virus scanner tab and click the Start Scanner button—it’ll take a

 long time, but it should clean up your PC.

It’s as simple as that. Enjoy your virus-free PC.

Download the Avira Rescue System

How to Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your camera, computer, USB drive, or anywhere else? What
you might not know is that you can usually restore those pictures—even from your camera’s memory stick.

Windows tries to prevent you from making a big mistake by providing the Recycle Bin, where deleted files hang around for a while—but unfortunately it doesn’t work for external USB
drives, USB flash drives, memory sticks, or mapped drives. Luckily there’s another way to
recover deleted files.

Note: we originally wrote this article a year ago, but we’ve received this question so many times from readers, friends, and families that we’ve polished it up and are republishing it for everybody. So far, everybody has reported success!

Restore that File or Photo using Recuva

The first piece of software that you’ll want to try is called Recuva, and it’s extremely easy to
use—just make sure when you are installing it, that you don’t accidentally install that stupid Yahoo! toolbar that nobody wants.

Now that you’ve installed the software, and avoided an awful toolbar installation, launch the Recuva wizard and let’s start through the process of recovering those pictures you shouldn’t
have deleted.

The first step on the wizard page will let you tell Recuva to only search for a specific type of file, which can save a lot of time while searching, and make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Next you’ll need to specify where the file was, which will obviously be up to wherever you deleted it from. Since I deleted mine from my camera’s SD card, that’s where I’m looking for it.

The next page will ask you whether you want to do a Deep Scan. My recommendation is to not select this for the first scan, because usually the quick scan can find it. You can always go back and run a deep scan a second time.

And now, you’ll see all of the pictures deleted from your drive, memory stick, SD card, or
wherever you searched. Looks like what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas after all…

If there are a really large number of results, and you know exactly when the file was created or modified, you can switch to the advanced view, where you can sort by the last modified time.
This can help speed up the process quite a bit, so you don’t have to look through quite as
many files.

At this point, you can right-click on any filename, and choose to Recover it, and then save the
files elsewhere on your drive. Awesome!

Download Recuva from piriform.com

Restore that File or Photo using DiskDigger

Update: it looks like since we first wrote about this, DiskDigger became shareware, which gives you a prompt for every file you save. It’s up to you whether you want to try it—best bet, try Recuva first. You could alternatively use the slightly older, but still totally free, portable version of the application from portablefreeware.com. Thanks, Mary!

If you don’t have any luck with Recuva, you can always try out DiskDigger, another excellent piece of software. I’ve tested both of these applications very thoroughly, and found that neither of them will always find the same files, so it’s best to have both of them in your toolkit.

Note that DiskDigger doesn’t require installation, making it a really great tool to throw on your PC repair Flash drive.

Start off by choosing the drive you want to recover from…

Now you can choose whether to do a deep scan, or a really deep scan. Just like with Recuva,
you’ll probably want to select the first one first. I’ve also had much better luck with the regular scan, rather than the “dig deeper” one.

If you do choose the “dig deeper” one, you’ll be able to select exactly which types of files you
are looking for, though again, you should use the regular scan first.

Once you’ve come up with the results, you can click on the items on the left-hand side, and see
a preview on the right.

You can select one or more files, and choose to restore them. It’s pretty simple!

Good luck recovering your deleted files!

How to Use the Kaspersky Rescue Disk to Clean Your Infected PC

When you’re dealing with a PC that is completely infected in viruses, sometimes the best
thing to do is reboot into a rescue disk and run a full virus scan from there. Here’s how to
use the Kaspersky Rescue Disk to clean an infected PC.

There’s lots of ways to clean an infected PC, like booting into an Ubuntu Live CD and scanning for viruses, but this is an extremely simple—and free—solution from a trusted anti-virus vendor.

Download and Burn the Image to a Disc

The first thing you’ll need to do is head over to the Kaspersky site and download the
 latest version of their rescue disk, and then use an application to burn that ISO image file
to an optical disc—we prefer using ImgBurn, but there’s plenty of ways to burn an ISO to
a disc.

Using the Kaspersky Rescue Disk to Clean an Infected PC

Once you’ve got the disc in hand, put it into the PC and reboot—you should see a new screen that says “Press any key to enter the menu”, at which point you should probably press any key.
To enter the menu, of course. If you don’t, it’ll boot normally into Windows.

At this point you’ll be able to choose whether to use the Graphic or Text mode, and we’d recommend using the Graphic mode unless there’s some problem, which there really
shouldn’t be.

You’ll be prompted to type the letter “a” to accept the agreement. What’s weird is that it didn’t work with a capital letter “A” for us, even though that’s what it shows in the screenshot.

Within a few short seconds you should see the full working environment, with the Kaspersky Rescue Disk screen front and center.

The first thing you want to do is switch tabs over to the My Update Center, and then click the Start update button to load the latest anti-virus definitions from their web site—this is a
critical step!

Once done, switch back over to the Objects Scan tab, select the drives you want to scan, and then click the Start Objects Scan button.

The scan will run, and clean up any viruses that it finds. You’ll be prompted when you do encounter a virus, and you’ll have to choose whether to clean or quarantine the files—the
typical anti-virus behavior.

If you need to do some more work or research on the PC, you can access some tools directly
from the menu below, which has a fully working web browser, command line, and a file
manager.

You’ll be able to access your Windows partition through the /discs/C: folder, and do any
other maintenance work you need to do.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Enjoy cleaning viruses.

Download the Kaspersky Rescue Disk from support.kaspersky.com