avira rescue cd - your experiences?

yesterday i was working on someone's laptop, trying to clean some viruses out of it. the first thing i did was put the avira rescue disc in as an initial cleaner - but after about 45 minutes, it stalled and simply stopped scanning, though the timer was still running. eventually i gave up on it and went with something else to get the job done. it did clean 2 virii before it stalled though.

the last message it gave before stalling was something about "wild tangent yadda yadda, bad compressed data" and that was it..

anyway, id like to hear from some others regarding their experience with using the avira rescue disc

thanks

 

I have had trouble getting Avira Rescue CD to download the newest definitions. I downloaded the latest CD to get an up to date version. Of the rescue CDs I've tried, Avira wasn't alone in that regard. Kaspersky is the only one that worked flawlessly. I had no issues with scanning and both times I used Avira Rescue CD, the system I scanned was clean.

 

Did you have a "wired" or "wireless" Internet Connection when you had trouble downloading the newest definitions?

The Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 and the Bitdefender Rescue CD both support "wireless" with the Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 having the best "wireless" support.

The Avira Rescue System CD does not support "wireless".

 

I have limited experience with cleaning Malware from PC's. I have used the Avira Rescue System CD on my PC's (Log only) as a second opinion. It seems like one time it did "stall' on me. I don't know why it stalled. It seems to work fine most of the time.

I have noticed a couple of times that the Avira Rescue System CD identifies Process Killers as Malware whether or not they are Malware. Some HP/Compaq PC's have a Process Killer and one well known Corporate Accounting Application has a Process Killer.

 

Why is the new rescue cd a .exe file? for what reason they did not release a .iso file?

 

The .exe file allows you to burn the iso in a cd, just in case you dont have a burning software, it already includes the iso. You also have the option to download only the iso file.

About Avira rescue cd, i like the fact that the ISO is updated several times a day, so one can simply download, burn (to a CD, or create a bootable USB with universal usb installer), and run it in the infected computer.

A bad experiece i had, was a damaged recovery partition from a computer i was repairing. I selected the option to delete if repair isn't possible, and so all the spyware that was blended within the recovery partition was deleted, making the recovery partition unusable.

 

Here you can choose to download the .iso or the .exe:
http://www.avira.com/pt-br/download/product/avira-antivir-rescue-system

 

It was a system that uses wireless. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future. Thanks for the heads-up!

 

All rescue images are hit or miss if they work on a particular machine. Maybe a laptop won't read a burned CD, or the software doesn't work with a particular USB stick.

I have multiple CDs and multi-boot USB sticks and at least one will work. I always use an ethernet cable if possible.

Avira has always been better than most, plain UI, faster than average. I've never had any critical problems other than it refusing to work. I prefer Dr Web or Panda/Kasp for rootkit/bootkits but I've not used any much this year. I'm behind the times.

If I'm using a rescue environment, I like to go in with something I can fix the autoruns myself with, and use the antivirus rescue CDs to make sure I've not missed anything. Often it's quicker to just fix things within Windows as not all trojans are that sophisticated, and you can deal with rootkits separately.