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Bootable rescue CDs can fix your damaged Windows
By Mark Joseph Edwards
When your system is so corrupt with malware that it becomes unstable or won't even boot, a bootable rescue CD can give it the scrubbing it needs.
The free anti-malware rescue CDs I describe today have all the tools you need to remove viruses and restore Windows' health.
Two anti-malware rescue CDs outshine the others
When your PC is infected with one or more types of vicious malware, the machine may behave erratically or not boot at all. The best cure is to boot the system using another OS and scan the PC's hard drives to find and remove the malware.
But how can you do all that without installing a whole new OS? The answer is simple: use a bootable anti-malware rescue CD.
At a minimum, such a CD should contain a decent anti-malware scanner, although such CDs usually include other helpful tools, such as a partition manager and Web browser. You boot your system from the rescue CD, select options from a menu, and let the tool scan your PC to detect and possibly remove malware. Hopefully, that process resolves your problems.
Some desktop anti-malware solutions allow you to create a rescue disk. However, there are at least six vendors who make standalone, downloadable rescue CDs that anyone can get their hands on: Avast!, AVG (formerly Grisoft), Avira, BitDefender, F-Secure, and Kaspersky. All of these solutions are offered for free except the ones from AVG and Avast.
The advantages to using a bootable rescue CD are that you have access to another vendor's solution and you don't need to install a full-blown desktop application in order to create a rescue disk.
I found each of the products to be useful, though one is clearly better than the others: Avira's free AntiVir Rescue System. When it comes to anti-malware detection and removal, however, one vendor's solution may not handle every issue that other vendors' solutions can.
I suggest that you download all four of the free solutions. If you administer a business network, you should seriously consider buying the AVG and Avast solutions, too. That way, when you're in a pinch, you can try all the possible options to clear up a problem.
When you've got at least four free anti-malware solutions to choose from, which one do you use first? That comes down to which tool provides the best on-demand malware detection rates. Since I don't have a full-blown anti-malware test lab — which is a complex and difficult-to-maintain service — I defer to the experts who do maintain such labs.
As in the past, I rely on the results published by Virus Bulletin, a well-known and respected independent lab. Virus Bulletin recently tested 35 anti-malware solutions using samples from the WildList as it stood in April 2008. The tests were conducted using product releases available as of June 24, 2008. Five of the 35 virus scanners are available on their respective vendors' rescue CDs and are reviewed here.
My overall scores cover the ready-made free products; I also summarize the features available in the two commercial products and offer a couple of other rescue alternatives.
All of the products that I rate work basically the same way: there is no installation or removal process required with a boot CD, and disk scanning is performed by selecting menu items. My ratings are based on each product's ability to detect malware and on the other features included on each CD. As it turns out, the tools with the most features also have the best on-demand scanning capabilities.
#1: AVIRA ANTIVIR RESCUE SYSTEM
Free version
95
More info
The rescue CD with the best malware detection
Avira's solution is the best anti-malware rescue CD you can get today. The AntiVir Rescue System doesn't come with a full-blown Linux GUI-based desktop, as does BitDefender (my #2 choice). But the program's text-based command shell comes in handy for such basic tasks as copying, moving, and deleting files.
You can set the AntiVir Rescue System to update its anti-malware definitions when it boots up, although this requires an active Internet connection. What makes AntiVir the #1 rescue CD is that its malware scanner has the highest virus-detection score of all the products I examined.
AntiVir detected all worms, bots, file infectors, and polymorphic virus strains. The program also caught 98.27% of all Trojans thrown at it. Very little gets past AntiVir, and that's a big reason why Avira's solution earns the top rating.