Make restorable images???

[NewbTechDude]

I have a few friends that would like me to fix some virus/malware issues. Most are Win 7 users(a few running XP), but don't have any of their installation media or driver disks or anything. I'd love to help them, but I've had a few personal instances where I used Norton or a similar program to scan for viruses before, and when it did so it removed some of the boot files, or some other system critical file. I don't want that to happen here, cause I don't want to give them back useless machines. So, I'm wondering how to avoid this

Can I just create a "Repair Disk(DVD)" in Windows? Will that take care of an issue like the one I described above?

Should I use an external to create images of each, one at a time, run the scans and then use the image if anything goes wrong? And if something does go wrong, how would I restore from the image? I've never done that before, and I'm eager to learn.

If anyone has any advice, tips, hints, can point me to a good tutorial, or has done this before, please let me know what you think I should do. These people aren't paying me, but I'd love to be able to help them out. Any and all advice will be greatly appreciated.

 

[ittimjones]

It's common knowledge that the best way to work on a PC for someone is to make an image of the HDD, and then work on the image of it. (put that image on a spare HDD u have and then work on it from there) Most people don't have a spare, so u have to work on the original hardware, but making an image as backup is best way to ensure you don't give them a machine with files that were lost and can never be recovered or w/e. that does take a long time though.

Typically, when I work on a laptop for a friend. I just install malwarebytes, let it scan, remove what it finds, install the AV software and run a full scan w/ that too. Then run updates (windows and browser extensions like flash, java, adobe reader, shockwave) and ccleaner and defrag. If files are lost, I say that it was really messed up and I couldn't save what they had. Also ALWAYS have a few variations of Windows install disks around, so that you can run repairs from the disk, if there are system errors.

 

[NewbTechDude]

Sweet man. Thanks for the info. Malwarebytes is definitely awesome. I appreciate the advice.

 

[Hawkeye22]

If their computer is already infected, you need to let them know that some stuff is probably already too far gone. No one should expect their machine to be 100% after it has become infected, no matter how good you clean it up. After all, that's the point of malware - to cause damage.