OT, retrieving data off a virus'ed HD

[Ohio Mike]

Best solution is "A". But copy over the data you need to your new machine and then remove the drive. If the drive is to be reused in a machine a full format should be done to ensure its clean.

Hard drives are dirt cheap these days I tend to buy new ones whenever a reload is necessary. Simple remove the old disk install a new disk and install everything on the new disk and then put the old disk in and migrate the data over. Then I remove the old disk mark it with a sharpie and place on the shelf as an archive. Takes a couple of hours tops.

[Evan]

"A" will work fine. Once you transfer the files then scan them. They aren't likely to be infected since they aren't executable files but do it anyway.

[DR]

Hi,

The problem is I have an XP system (no particular value) with a HD with data I'd like to retrieve. The data happens to be CAD files that were not backed up.

The system has a virus (?) and I'm not able to reload XP.

A: If I took the HD out and plugged it into another XP system maybe as drive "D" could I retrieve the data that way?

B: Do the above and run anti-virus on that drive in the other computer to clean it up,put it back into original machine, reload XP to give access to data?

C: Or, is there a better way?

Thanks for any advice.