I have a couple of these, and am quote happy with them:snowshaker wrote:If you got pics and stuff on the old drives, get a $20 USB enclosure and mount the drive. Then read it with another machine and save off what you need. Caution. Don't use a windows PC. Boot up Puppy or Linux or use a MAC. If the drive has an autorun.inf virus, it will jump right onto your good windows PC. Maybe that's what happened to you already?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812119152
(note that these devices generally want the drive jumpered as "slave")
Though by USB stick is a different matter...As for viruses spreading via RAM sticks, that's just urban legend. RAM loses its data when powered down. Maybe your article was
And by pulling the HDD, you can eliminate faulty hardware as the access issue.speaking of the BIOS memory. If you could stick a virus in there, it stays with the chip. What could it do? Well, I have read where one guy claim his BIOS shows his picture when the PC boots, so that could be one way for a virus to keep you from booting into CD.
More likely though that you just have a bad CD drive, given that its tray was stuck.
If you have Puppy running (e.g. a pupsave on a USB and a live boot CD), I put together this collection of links to make the latest ClamAV run on Puppy 4.3.1 (again...sorry...I haven't played with building .pets yet -- just run each of the Debian .deb files, and ClamAV will work -- I haven't tested this on older Puppy versions, but it's likely to work there as well)
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=53171
However, while you have the drive mounted (perhaps even before scanning for viruses), copy all the personal files off. There is always a chance that a scan will stress the hardware enough to kill the drive, if it's weak.
If you have XP on the drive, your files are _likely_ to all be buried under "Documents and settings'.