Spyware....... ugh! Backing up 80GB? How to go about it?

[Black Panther]

My dad's laptop got something. It's changing his desktop background picture to one in plain blue background with yellow fonts telling him to install antispyware and antivirus. It ruined his Avast and I had to reinstall it, and it's not letting him connect to the internet. So now I can't update avast to do a virus scan.

I scanned with AVG spyware which removed quite some stuff, a couple of which were high risk. But the problem still remains, even though I removed most suspicious entries from Hijackthis.

I think the best way to go around it, apart from finding a solution, would be a fresh windows install. The laptop really needs it...

But what's holding me back is that he has like 80GB of stuff (family photos, encyclopedias, movies and books ) which he doesn't want to lose. I have no idea how I can back up that stuff... and I dare not think how time-consuming it'd be!
How much MB does a dvd hold? But to top it all I think he told me once that he never managed to burn a dvd on that laptop. I have a 2GB pendrive, but to record 80GB using that...

Is there a way I can connect the laptop to my pc so as to leave it alone copying onto my HDD?
Or would that be too risky because something bad might come over on my rig as well...

Any ideas?

 

[Triprift]

dvd,s hold about 4.7 gig wich would mean yad need 17 discs the best bet would be an external hard drive if youve got one.

 

[Ripper3]

I agree with the external drive, it's a lot safer, for one thing.

If it's a SATA laptop drive, and you have a Linux distro installed, you might want to connect it to the PC (as it won't require an adaptor like the IDE laptop drives do), and boot into Linux, then install an anti-virus, scan and clean the drive, then copy over the files. If you copy files without a scan might get you infected as well, once you boot back into Windows, or copy the files over again, after a clean install.

 

[Black Panther]

Thanks, I didn't think about the external HDD...
But I haven't got one either lol.

I'll play around with that pc for some time tonight, and if I still can't get it to work properly I'll tell my dad to buy one. After all it's his laptop.

 

[jbunch07]

be carefull what you copy though...some spyware will "migrate"
this happened to me when i was wrkin at ccity, we kept all our sw on jumpdrives and after installing av sw on a customers computer some kind of virus or something had infected one of the files on my jumpdrive so just scan everything with avg antispyware before you move anything

 

[Black Panther]

The thing is that I have scanned the laptop with AVG Anti-spyware. Obviously not updated since it can't connect to the net.

It detected some stuff but not the thing which is changing the desktop.

I haven't tried connecting it to the net myself. Was going to try so tonight but I don't have the type of cable it needs...

Is there any way that I can copy updated spyware database of AVG from my rig onto the laptop?

Edit: I think I found how... I'm copying the Signatures folder from one pc to the other via pendrive...

 

[francis511]

Sounds like smitfraud. You can get various patches on the web to return control of your desktop by googling SMITFRAUD (if that`s what it is)

 

[driver66]

or install an updated A/V program to your thumbdrive and run it from there?

 

[Black Panther]

I did it!

Noahdfear's SmitFraud and SpyAxe removal tool, SmitRem.exe, did the trick!



It hadn't been SmitFraud though. That one gives a desktop mimicking a BSOD. The laptop just gave a blue background on it written "Warning spyware detected on your computer. Install an antivirus or spyware remover to clean your computer". It's not a popup. Just a background whose name always changes if you check it out under the Display Properties - Desktop.
It's more common, I found out to google, that instead of the background being blue it is black.

 

[Black Panther]

The only problem which remained was the internet connection. Modem worked and I was connected but I couldn't access web sites or email.

Thanks to some googlin about I found that I had to delete these 2 registry keys, and import them from another comuter: I;ll note them down just in case someone comes across a similar problem.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Winsock
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Winsock2

Luckily I had my pc to import them form and it worked.

Later I realised that I exported reg keys from xp pro to xp home... forgot about that but who cares since it works?

I'm typing this in from the lappie... omg never imagined laptop keyboards are so awkward... sorry for the spelling.

 

[Wile E]

I personally would do a clean install anyway, just in case. I hate infections. lol.

As for burning to multiple DVD's, Roxio EMC 8 and higher has automatic disc spanning. So you just drop a bunch of files into the burning prog, and it automatically splits it up into 4.7GB chunks, and even puts a little standalone recovery app on each disc.

 

[Triprift]

Update panther is everything going good now?

 

[Black Panther]

Update panther is everything going good now?

Everything worked well for a week or so.
Then it seems he got something else.

My guess is that it's a hack of some sort. The laptop starts uploading like crazy if put online.

I don't think it's related to the first problem in this thread, because when in my possession I had tested the lappie extensively, and used it online for hours and no such thing had happened, that's why I started a new thread for the new problem.
(My dad's a serial pc killer).

Edit - btw can normal members close a thread when the issue is solved or can only mods do it?

 

[kenkickr]

Grab a great utility called xxcopy: http://www.xxcopy.com/download/xxcopy.zip

Extract to C:\, install, then open up command prompt(cmd).

This works awesome if you pull the drive and throw it an external enclosure or if its sata just throw it in your system.

Now in cmd prompt make sure you are at C:\. type xxcopy X:\ C:\Backup /s /h /x:*.sys

X is his drive directory and C:\Backup is the location and name of the backup folder.

I use this all the time for backing up and just moving files on my system because it will cut the time of file transfers from 1/4 to 1/2 the time it takes to drag and drop.

 

[7mm]

I'd say you better get rid of the problem rather than try'n to get away from it. I've had similar problem with my friend's PC asking him to install / purchase an anti-virus / spyware. We cam over it with Spyware Doctor from PCTools (Starter Edition, Free). Also, AdAware PE will do the job as well. Just make sure you've got the latest updates installed. These two are Free edtions so don't worry about investing a new software (They've got limitations ONLY as not having an On acccess scanner, which you can do without in most cases).