Although Antivirus suites including MS Security Essentials, Avira, Avast, Norton AntiVirus etc., help us protect the system from malwares, viruses, spywares, keyloggers and other like potentially harmful programs, sometimes malware infected applications manage to slip through deployed antivirus security cracks and attack the system booting process. In such a case, anti-virus suites can’t identify and remove the infected application/processes unless the you repair the infected system boot sectors, and then boot into Windows to perform the virus removal operation over entire disk. In this post, we will show you how to clean your system from viruses when you can not boot into Windows.

Using Ubuntu Live Disk

Earlier, we brought you guide on how to create a persistent Ubuntu Live USB and then use it to reset Windows 7 admin and standard account password, wipe hard disk data, and recover hard disk data and repair lost partitions. Since Ubuntu Live Disk doesn’t require booting the installed OS to access primary hard drive, we could use it to scan the system for virus infected applications and scripts.

First off, follow the steps mentioned here to create Ubuntu Live Disk. Once done, move to virus-infected PC and change the boot priority option from BIOS menu. All you need is to reboot the system, and press F2, F10, DEL, or other system defined key to enter into BIOS menu. Now, move to boot menu and set External USB/Hard Disk as first boot option. Now, plug-in the Ubuntu Live Disk, save the changes made to BIOS and reboot the system. It will take you to Ubuntu Live boot menu, select Run Ubuntu from this USB option and hit Enter to begin loading Ubuntu OS.

Just like Windows, Ubuntu supports a wide range of anti-virus suites including Avast, Bitdefender, F-PROT antivirus etc, but since Linux based OS are not vulnerable to malwares, virus and like attacks, many users don’t install on their Linux systems. Avast Workstation is available for free, and provides an easy way to scan not only only auxiliary storage mediums, but also the external hard drives. You can download Avast Linux Home Edition (DEB package) from here. Once downloaded, right-click the DEB package, and select Open With Ubuntu Software Center.

It will open Ubuntu Software Center. Now, just click Install to begin installing Avast Linux Home Edition. When installation is completed, close the Ubuntu Software Center.

Before launching avast!, you need to mount the hard disk, which is to be scanned for viruses. For hard drive with multiple partitions, mount the partition where Windows is installed. Click Places on panel, and click the hard disk to mount.

Once you’ve identified the hard drive, move to Applications –> Accessories menu, and select avast! Antivirus.

Before you start the scanning process, you need to update virus definition database; just click Update database to download all the essential virus definitions. Now, enable Selected folders option, and then click Add button.

You will find the hard disk under media folder; expand location with home icon followed by media folder to select the required hard disk/partition folder.

Clicking OK will add the hard disk to scan locations list. Similarly, you can add more locations to the list from different hard disk partitions. When all locations are added, hit Start Scan to begin the virus scanning process. It will open the scan result report after scanning all the specified locations. From Results of last scan window, you can move the files to chest, move or rename them, or delete them from your hard disk via right-click context menu.

Using SARDU (Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility)

When it comes to fixing system issues and scanning hard disks for viruses without booting the OS, SARDU offers a simple, yet powerful environment to perform numerous system repair operations. For those who aren’t familiar with SARDU, it can burn a number of bootable anti-virus suites, system repair utilities and Live Operating Systems on a single USB/CD, letting users perform all the essential operations to fix the issues. Since SARDU has been specifically designed to scan the system for viruses and identify OS boot up issues, you can use it to burn your favorite anti-virus rescue disk (if available) to USB, and then boot it to thoroughly scan the system for viruses and malwares. To begin, create a SARDU disk by following the steps mentioned here. it must be noted that you can choose to add multiple anti-virus utilities to your USB.

Once bootable antivirus utilities are burnt, plug-in the disk into virus infected PC, and open BIOS menu. Now, set External USB/Hard Disk as first boot option and reboot the system after saving changes made to BIOS. It will open SARDU boot menu, containing the selected anti-virus and system repair utilities. If you, for instance, chose to select AVG rescue disk while making SARDU bootable USB, navigate to Menu Antivirus, and then select Boot from AVG.

It will start loading AVG boot disk, and take you to AVG boot menu. Now, select AVG Rescue CD for performing virus scan operations.

When you select the AVG Rescue option, it will start mounting all the partitions. Once done, you will see the main menu, containing options to perform on-demand system scan, view previous scan results, configure anti-virus options and download essential update, run scripts for fixing known issues, change virus database and so on. To perform the virus scan operation, navigate to Scan option, and hit Enter,

It will ask you to select either the volumes or specific directories within the mounted partitions to scan. We recommend selecting all the hard disk partitions in order to find the viruses and malwares. When volumes are selected, it will present the scanning options including scan inside archives, report password protected files, report archive bombs, use heuristics for scanning, scan cookies, recognize hidden extensions etc. To include additional scanning operations, navigate to the option you want to enable and hit Spacebar.

Once done, hit Enter to start the scanning the specified mounted volumes.

Hopefully, after following above steps, you will be able to completely remove system boot viruses and malware from the PC. If none of above methods work out for you, we recommend using Hiren’s Boot CD to perform boot-sector virus removal operations. You can check out this article to learn more about Hiren’s Boot CD.

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We often come across corrupted RAR archives that cannot be extracted due to voids or incomplete binaries, and there is no way to open the files normally. AutoUnpack is a Windows application that repairs your damaged and corrupted archives, but, if, for some reason, it fails to perform its required task, you can take a look at Recovery Toolbox for RAR. It is a RAR repair tool which does not modify corrupted documents, and can easily open files which are not accessible. It does not matter which application was used to create the RAR archive; Recovery Toolbox for RAR can access it.

To start, click Open File button and navigate to the corrupted RAR files. When files are selected, click Next.

Recovery Toolbox for RAR will process the file and display related information. If the files are corrupted, you will have a Next button between Back and Finish. Check the corrupted files and click Next.

In the next step, define a folder to save the repaired and extracted file and click Next. The files will be repaired and extracted and a summary of the recovery process will be shown at the end.

Recovery Toolbox for RAR works on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Download Recovery Toolbox for RAR

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To customize Ubuntu boot options by managing GRUB Manager, Plymouth and Burg, you can use the previously reviewed Super Boot Manager for Ubuntu. However, tweaking too much with boot options can lead to several issues, including, the inability of the operating system to boot after another OS is installed, loss of access to GRUB  boot loader and issues with boot sector MBR.

Boot Repair is an Ubuntu tool which can easily resolve such issues. As this is a GUI based application, therefore, you will require being logged into your operating system for it to work. Therefore, despite the boot issues, you should be able to get access to your desktop for this app to resolve the boot issues. Having said that, the issues which it resolves mainly do not cause the inability of a system to loose boot functionality. For example, the GRUB boot problems may be causing inconsistency in allowing you to boot from your OS. Similarly, if you have installed another operating system, you might not be able to login from Ubuntu by default.

To get started, open a Terminal Window and enter the following command lines;

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair-ubuntu

Launch Boot loader from Applications Menu and select options which may resolve your issues. For example, you may select a default OS to boot from (in case of multiple operating system installed on your machine), manually purge GRUB or place GRUB into SDA. Click Apply, OK to continue.

A confirmation prompt will inform you that the boot options were successfully resolved. You will require restarting your system for the changes to take effect. Boot Repair is a good application for resolving minor boot issues such as the ones mentioned above. It serves as a one stop repair mechanism to fix GRUB and associated boot issues in a few clicks. You can also Download Boot Repair from the Launchpad link given below.

Download Boot Repair

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It often happens that a file can become corrupt when a system shuts down or due to unexpected power failure, virus infection, application errors and the like. It can be quite a nuisance to attempt recovery of important data from such files and many a times results in failure.

File Repair is robust application for recovering corrupt files of several formats. This includes anything from an MS Word, Excel, Power Point, Access, video, audio, image  file to a compressed Zip or RAR achieve. The supported file extensions include: DOC, DOCX, DOCM, RTF,PDF,XLS, XLA, XLSX, Zip, RAR, AVI, FLV, Mp4, MOV, WMV, ASF, MPG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, PPT, PPS, PPTX, Mp3, WAV, MDB, MDE, ACCDB and ACCDE.

Just select a corrupt file (of the supported format) and click Start repair to begin file recovery. During the recovery process, a file log will appear, displaying relevant information regarding the recovery process.

Normally, the above mentioned procedure should recover your corrupt file, however, in case the recovery process is unsuccessful a prompt displays a messages that you can attach and email the file to the developer’s team of file repair experts and they will recover the file for you and send it back within 24 hours. The expected time of return for the returned file may even be less, i.e. up to an hour but  a 24 hour window has been mentioned as the maximum time.

Please keep in mind that it is only able to repair the file if the following errors are occuring:

• File is not in a recognizable format
• Unable to read file
• File cannot be accessed
• Application cannot open the type of file represented by filename
• Out of memory errors, or low system resources errors

File Repair works on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Download File Repair

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By now, you would be well aware of the plethora of problems that virus and malware attacks leave in their wake. Disabled Task Manager, Registry Editor vanishing, Command Prompt barred, Folder Options nowhere to be found, just to name a few. While many anti-malware applications are good enough when it comes to removing the infection, they cannot exactly repair the collateral damage that your system had suffered. Hence a utility like Quick Disaster Recovery comes into play.

This very light, free and portable tool has been created to repair those minor issues that are usually left behind by a malware infection. It can fix quite a few common issues, and can also serve as a very basic task manager replacement, should Windows task manager may not be accessible.

As you can see from the screenshot above, all options are grayed out because nothing is wrong with my computer. For me, the only two options available are either to delete my temporary internet files, or to launch the task manager replacement, exhibited in the next screenshot. Having non-applicable options disabled is a good thing since it prevents any accidental changes to your machine.

Quick Disaster Recovery is an open source project developed for the MS Windows operating environment. We tested it on Windows 7 x86 system setup, but the developer says it should work fine with 64-bit architecture as well.

Download Quick Disaster Recovery

For more, also check out Remove Restriction Tool.

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Seagate and Maxtor, both are popular brands for Internal and External drives. If you are one of those users who own a drive that is made by any of the above two companies and is not working properly, then you can diagnose the drives with SeaTools. It supports non-Seagate drives as well, but in my testing it worked better with Seagate and Maxtor drives largely because it has been developed by Seagate itself.

Note: Maxtor is part of Seagate, so it is the same company actually.

Once installed, load it up and it will scan for all drives connected to your computer. Once the scan is complete, you will be shown a list of all drives. To run the test, check the drive, click Basic Tests and choose the type of test you want to want to perform.

Once the scan is complete, you will be shown the Pass status. If something is wrong with your drive, the error will be shown so that you can repair the problem more easily. It works on Windows only, Mac and Linux users are out of luck.

Download SeaTools

Minimum .NET Framework 2.0 is required and it works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Enjoy!

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Upcoming Windows 7 is being said to be the most secure and reliable as compared with other versions of Windows, but you can still run into problem, the worst case being when your Windows stops booting. Windows 7 has a solution to this problem, create System Repair Disc. Once you run into this problem,  you can boot your system with it and it will give you access to System Recovery tools which will let you diagnose and correct errors within Windows 7. It is very easy to create a System Repair disk since no special disk burning software is required.

Note: If you haven’t created the System Repair Disk and your Windows 7 fails to boot, you can borrow it from your friend or co-worker. The system repair disk should work on all computers that are running Windows 7.

First, navigate all the way to Start > All Programs > Maintenance > Create a System Repair Disc.

Now, insert a blank CD/DVD into you CD/DVD ROM and click Create disc. An empty CD should be large enough for a System Repair Disc because it does not consume much space. It will take some time to create the repair disk, you will be able to monitor the process with the help of progress bar.

Once the process is complete, click OK and eject disk from drive.

Thats all, now keep the System Repair Disc safe since it will be needed when Windows 7 fails to boot. Enjoy!

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FreeFixer is a free tool for Windows that assets a user in removing potentially unwanted programs such as spyware, trojans, adware, viruses and worms. According to the developer, this tool works by scanning a large number of locations where unwanted software has a known record of appearing or leaving traces.

Once you have installed this tool, run it and click Start Scan.

It will then scan all locations for various unwanted software.

After the scan is complete, it will list all programs in a simple-to-use window. Remember that this program does not know which item in the list is BAD and should be removed, it does however whitelist all trusted programs from the scan results. The programs highlighted in Green means they are trusted while those in RED means they are dangerous. To check full details about any item, click More Info link next to it.

Note: Clicking More Info link will take you to the vendor’s site(FreeFixer Library) where you can find further details about this program.

FreeFixer has a large online library that contains information of most types of software. If you have any doubt about a program, you can always visit the library. You can remove/repair selected items by clicking the Fix link. There is also an option to re-scan the system and saving log files.

Those files that could not be removed at the moment will be removed after the next computer restart.

Warning: Do not remove system files, since it could lead to system crash or instability. To find out whether a program is a critical system file, click More Info link.

If you still having some trouble, you can save the log and share it over with a strong FreeFixer community who can help you in fixing the problems. It works with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7. It does not support 64-bit Operating systems at the moment. Enjoy!

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Your Microsoft Office Word 2007/2010 documents or Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets could get corrupted due to various reasons, two of the most common being data transfer error and hard disk crash. Once your documents get corrupted, it becomes quite difficult to recover them. Try opening a corrupt Microsoft document and you will receive an error that data is corrupt, which does not help us in any way. There are two ways to recover Word and Excel files, the first method is to buy an expensive recovery suite(which I would not recommend), and the second method, is below.

To recover Word 2007 documents we will use Damaged docx2txt.

To recover Excel 2007 spreadsheets we will use Corrupt xlsx2csv.

Both tools have been developed by S2 Services and are FREE. We will discuss both of them in details below.

Damaged docx2txt

This tool recovers the Word 2007 document by extracting text from it. Just run it, select File > Open and select your corrupt document. The extracted text would be visible in the main window, to save this text, go to File > Save and then give it any name. It saves all recovered text in .txt format.

Corrupt xlsx2csv

This tool recovers Excel 2007 spreadsheets by using a command line unzipping program. It has an easy-to-use GUI, just like Docx2txt. All you have to do is click Step 1, select your Excel 2007 file and click Open. The recovered rows and tables will be displayed on the main window. To save all recovered Excel files in .csv format, click Step 2.

To check if you important data has been recovered, you can use the build-in search feature.

Conclusion

Both are portable tools and require at least .NET framework 2.0 to run. These tools can only recover Microsoft Word 2007 and Excel 2007 files. If you have an older version of Office, i.e 2003, then it won’t work.

Download – [S2 Services Data Recovery Tools]

Enjoy!

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Did you download some AVI video and later found that it was corrupted? Most people will download it again, which is useless since it will waste more time. DivFix++ is a free opensource software that repairs your video instantly by checking and fixing the errors automatically.

All you have to do is extract the archive and run the executable file(no installation is required). The software will look like this,

Now Select the path where you would like to save the output file and click Add Files button to add your AVI video file.

You can set the options whether to keep original file, cut our bad parts(where error occurs) from it, or keep log errors. Click Check Errors button to begin the repair process.

Once completed, it will show you the complete summary.

Now play your video and enjoy!

Direct link for Windows version is here.

Other versions(for Mac and Linux) can be found here.

Update: For a much easier way, you can try out Fix Player.

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Is your Windows giving you errors and not functioning properly? This usually means that your system files are missing or got corrupted due to some virus. Suppose a virus attacks your computer and you remove it using an anti-virus software, but the virus in fact removes your system files and makes some corrupted without your knowledge, removing the virus is only the first step, but fixing your system files is the most important step. Some people just re-install their Windows because they think it is too complicated to recover System files, but this is not true. Here is the best, quickest and fastest way to check and fix your missing and corrupted system files.

In Windows XP : Go to Start menu and click Run. Type sfc /scannow in the run command and click OK.

In Windows Vista :  Simply type sfc /scannow in Start Search and press Enter.

It will now start a full system scan, this process will take some time, so be patient.

It will scan all your system files to see if they are missing or corrupted, if it finds some to be corrupted or missing, it will then ask for Windows XP or Windows Vista(depending on which Operating System you are running the scan) installation disk to recover those files. After the recovery is complete, restart your computer and you are done. It’s that simple !

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Have you ever faced a problem where your antivirus deleted your important system files? For me this is even worse than the adverse effect of a virus itself. The best method to offset the infection is to Clean, Quarantine and Delete but if your antivirus deletes important system files by itself without asking permission than you must consider to recover those system files to prevent data loss, performance issues and missing system files notification at startup.

Windows has a built in tool called System Files Checker that reloads your system files with the help of Windows Installation Disk. This feature has become a part of every version of Windows after Windows 98. To fix your missing System files problem, follow these simple steps:

First, Disconnect your active internet connection.

Close all current programs even your anti virus, firewall and browsers.

Click Start, open the Run command,  type sfc /scannow and click OK.

The system file checkup will look in your windows folder for missing system files and fix it, during this process the checker may ask you to insert the Windows installation disk into the CD/DVD-Rom.

After completion, remove CD from the drive and reboot your computer.

Some common commands

• sfc /scannow  (Scans the entire system)
• sfc.exe /scanfile=c:\windows\system32\secur.dll (Scans a specific file, you can add any specific filename you want to scan instead of secur.dll)
• sfc.exe /verifyonly (This command only verifies the protected files not fix them)
• sfc /? (Help for sfc)

Hopefully the problem of missing system files will be fixed by this method.

Got any questions or queries, let us know.

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One of my favorite TV shows is The office. I love that show but it also takes up a lot of the hard drive space, with each episode of 350MB. I clutter my hard drive space due to this show, and that’s just this one show, not including other shows like Grey’s Anatomy or Supernatural. So, naturally I burn the shows onto DVDs, as it’s a cheap and easily accessible way to store data. But the only problem is the fact that CDs or DVDs aren’t invulnerable to all types of damage, and in fact, even a small finger print or scratch can make a DVD/CD player not able to read the disk. If you try to copy/paste the file on the damaged disk onto a computer, you usually get an error saying the file is corrupted, or damaged. But I found some really handy programs that can solve such problems, which I thought I’d share with you all today.

Method 1: CD Recovery Toolbox

CD Recovery Toolbox Free was developed for recovering damaged files CD, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-Ray etc. You can use it to restore information lost as a result of some mechanical damage of the disk (scratches, chips, different spots on the surface) or as a result of incorrect recording. This program can recover data that was considered lost.

To recover your data, insert you DVD or CD onto your drive and the CD recovery toolbox will search for the files already present on the disc, select the files you want to recover and press next.

Method 2: Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier

Roadkil’s Unstoppable Cleaner recovers files from any kind of damaged disk. It allows you to copy files from disks that give ‘corruption‘ errors, and those that are scratched. The program attempts to recover all the parts of the file that are still readable, and ignore the damaged parts. The program is tiny, and it needs no installation, so you can just jump straight in.

Method 3: ISO Puzzle

The goal of ISO Puzzle is to recover as much as possible data of damaged, bad burned or scratched CDs or DVDs. This version supports only data CDs and DVDs with sector size of 2048 byte – Audio CD, VCD and SVCD are not supported. Before you can start using IsoPuzzle, you’ll need to download WNASPI32.DLL from Nero and place it in the IsoPuzzle’s directory.

Just remember that you’ll have a part of  the file that is recoverable, the part that was originally damaged, will be skipped, as these programs don’t repair the disk, but instead recover all other parts of the file. So, for example, if you’re watching a film, 2 minutes of the film might be skipped, due to the fact that the part skipped was damaged.

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