How To Clean And Recover Data From A Severely Infected PC

Consider this heart stopping scenario :

"You turn on your beautiful PC one fine day expecting it to fulfill all the work you throw at it. The booting process takes a bit normal than usual, but you don't worry about it much. You enter you desktop and see that most of the icons are gone and that your PC is acting weirdly.Moreover,You find some unknown apps installed on your PC.

Regardless, you open up your important Project Files, and ...BAM!! the files are corrupted and you see some crabbed data instead of your pretty pretty Presentation's. You start getting anxious about your work files and immediately fire up your heck of an Antivirus to run a quick scan. 

That thing just found 150+ threats on your PC and yet waiting there in the corner of your taskbar for your consent to remove the threats and completely clean off your important work.You remember the other day, when you downloaded a pirated software from a website. You pluck your hair in anger and start cursing the moment you downloaded that file. You say to yourself that whatever happens,day or night, you are not gonna give up your data..."

This would indeed be a moment of life or death for you. Well, we here have a solution to help you bring back your precious data. You won't find a more detailed how-to guide on the internet.So hold on tight!!

Things You Need : An Active Internet Connection, A 4GB USB Drive(optional), Another computer or laptop(optional) .

STEP 1 : Download Required Utilities

You need to download the following utilities from the internet :

• Kapserksy Rescue Disk

• Rufus Utility , useful for creating bootable USB drive.

I recommend you download these files on a virus-free computer or laptop.Create a bootable USB with rufus utility.

STEP 2: Boot your PC into SAFE Mode

There are several ways to boot into Safe Mode in Windows 10. The best way is to hold down shift key and then click or tap on the restart button the start menu. Now your computer will restart and will present you with recovery options menu.

Now click on Troubleshoot . 

Select Startup Settings in the advanced options pane

Here you will find a list of options, for booting into safe-mode , you will have three options. Enable Safe-mode,Enable Safe Mode with Networking and Enable Safe-mode with Command Prompt.
For this purpose of the tutorial we are going to boot into safe mode with Networking, so you will have to press 5 on your keyboard.

Wait till your PC boots into safe mode. Once you boot into safe mode, login using your Admin account. This would guarantee full access to your system and will allow you to remove the malware files easily. Now before connnecting your USB drive, download MalwareBytes Anti-malware Free , if you dont have it installed on your PC and run a full scan on your infected PC.

Take a note of the threats found and remove all identified threats using MalwareBytes. Now refer your note and search google for the virus and try to find a removal tool for it.Go to google.com and type in "virus name removal tool" eg : "Win32/sality removal tool" . Even though MalwareBytes might have succesfully removed the threats, there may be some residue files left. You will be able to clean them with the removal tool you downloaded.

Now once everything is done, restart your PC.


STEP 3 : Boot into the USB drive

Connect the USB flash drive on your computer and boot into the Kaspersky rescue disk inside the USB drive. Now run a full computer scan using Kaspersky Rescue Disc and try to heal threats from files. You can also get your important files from the infected PC and do a clean install if you want.

Select Kaspersky Rescue Disk Graphic Mode in the provided menu. 

Once the rescue disk is loaded, press the settings   button at the bottom left corner of the desktop and select Kasperksy Rescue Disk from the open menu. Now it is recommended that you update the virus definitions for this, go to My Update Center tab and click on start update button.You can find detailed instructions on how to configure Internet connection via the application interface here.

Now click on the Scan objects tab. Check the boxes next to objects to be scanned for viruses. By default, Kaspersky Rescue Disk scans Disk boot sectors and Hidden startup objects.Click on Start Objects Scan.

If there are any threats detected, Kaspersky will notify you. You can take the following actions to handle the threats : Disinfect(lets you work with the file), delete(completely remove the file) , Quarantine (moves the threat to kaspersky storage for removal or restoration at a later time)

STEP 4 : Take A Backup Of all important files and login to Windows

Take a backup of all the clean files using the Kaspersky Rescue disk for later use. Remove the USB drive and Restart your computer. Try to login to Windows. Even if you have successfully logged in, I strongly recommend that you take a backup, and completely reinstall Windows.

You can take a backup by connecting another USB drive, having sufficient storage space to hold your important files. Now just simply copy the files from your hard drive to the USB drive using Kaspersky Rescue Disk.

Wrapping Up,

These are the steps you must do if your PC is severely infected with malware. Did i miss anything? if so feel free to mention it in the comments section below...Have a great day removing viruses :)

• ALSO READ : How To Remove Wannacry Ransomware From PC