Computer virus q -- which files aren't safe?

Factual Questions
1

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, I suppose. After over a decade of computing without a virus, my laptop got one this last weekend. :frowning: The computer cannot boot (blue screens and reboots).

I grabbed a version of Knoppix and saw last night that I could force a mount of the NTFS drive and read files fine enough. I’d like to get some data off the drive before I wipe it, but I realized last night that I don’t keep up with virus tech and I have no idea what could be infected anymore.

Generally, I want to grab my mp3s (safe) and some open office documents (safe?), but I’d also like to grab PDF files and pics/movies. I have some MS office documents, should I trust those?

What should I give up on, in general?

2

Since you will have everything saved on some external device just go ahead and save whatever you like, then scan it all, preferably with more than one scanner, before you put it back on your clean system. I would tend to use AVG, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Trend Housecall, all free.

3

real MP3s are safe, but some players (like the MS media player) can/could be tricked to downloading malicious codecs even when the files have an .mp3 extension. Video files are probably similar. Just don’t download any codecs you don’t trust.

Open Office docs are probably safe, but there are viruses for MS Office docs.

I seem to remember some vulnerabilities in the more “advanced” PDF files. Probably safe as long as you don’t use adobe acrobat reader.

In your case, I’d put the files on a separate hard drive or USB stick and do a full scan of the medium with an up-to-date virus scanner before opening any of the files in windows.

4

This does not necessarily indicate malware. Press F8 at startup and turn off the auto-reboot to see what it says. If you’ve got Vista or XP, you should be able to return to a previous restore point.

5

No, the malware was what I noticed in the task manager before I shut down. The first thing was killing apps I didn’t recognize. The second was going to be going through the registry to find problems, except, whoops! “Registry editing has been disabled by the administrator.” Ha… I shutdown, but heard a lot of the alert noises from the computer which indicate info/error dialog boxes on its way to shutting down, and then never again would it work. Ah, well.

That option was not available from F8.