Badly need tech help.

[Shards]

Hey, guys, haven't been around for a while.
Anyway, I've been having issues with my laptop, and I need some major help fixing it.

I've got a bad virus that very aggressively informs me of it's presence and tries to get me to buy an antivirus I'm pretty damn sure is fake. Either way, I have a backup ready from just after the last time I had to wipe the harddrive, and I'm trying to setup a restore to that point, but every time I try to open the restore center, the virus popup selling the anti-virus pops up, instead. Is there any way I can get around this, or do I need to perform a full wipe again?

[SteeleDragon78]

best advice is to get malware bytes and install it to a flash drive, open the laptop in safe mode, install and run, should take out the offending virus, if not, there are a number of good tools suggested in unsupportable just for this problem, other option is pull the hd out of the laptop and connect to another pc that has a good av in it and nuke that bug

[MnR]

If loading malwarebytes from a flash doesn't work the first time, I'd suggest loading rkill first, which kills the virus processes, then installing malewarebytes. I feel like I fix that type of problem on my family's computers every other month.

[Shards]

As of right now, a friend downloaded MWB and AVG and put them on a flash drive for me. I tried both, but AVG refused to install properly in safe mode, and MWB ran a full scan, removed all the offenders it found, and the problem is still occurring when I started back up on regular mode.

I'm trying to get rkill loaded now, but the virus seems to be blocking my ability to get it to start up, and I have no other computer with which to pick up rkill.

[SteeleDragon78]

depending on how big the drive is you may be able to install a small linux distro and use wine to run the av from linux, somewhere around is a boot disk that has an av that runs from the disk, im at a loss otherwise

[Geek King]

Try renaming the .exe files it is blocking. If it still blocks those, try setting up a batch (.bat) file to run the blocked file. The object at this point is to trick it into thinking you're not running the file it is trying to block.


If MWB is running, try to run it multiple times in safe mode. It sometimes takes more than one pass. Also, make sure you've downloaded the updates for it.

Another thing to try is to google (on a clean computer) the name of the fake anti-virus. If it has been out in the wild long, there will be info on cleaning it out there. Try to find the folder where it is hiding, and delete what you can find of it. Sometimes this screws up the workings of the virus enough to keep it from blocking the cleaners.

[protege]

Here's another program that might work. This one lets you see what's starting up when you boot up your computer. It's great for dealing with annoying items that constantly reinstall themselves on startup.