How to remove Virus from USB Drives
One of the ways by which a virus can infect your PC is through USB/Pen drives. Common viruses such as ’Ravmon’ , ‘New Folder.exe’, ‘Orkut is banned’ etc are spreading through USB drives. Most anti virus programs are unable to detect them and even if they do, in most cases they are unable to delete the file, only quarantine it. Here are the things which you can do if you want to remove such viruses from your USB drives
Whenever you plug a USB drive in your system, a window will appear similar to the one shown below
Don’t click on Ok , just choose ‘Cancel’. Open the Command Prompt by typing ‘cmd‘ in the run box. In the command prompt type the drive letter: and press enter . Now type dir /w/a and press enter.
This will display a list of the files in the pen drive. Check whether the following files are there or not
- Autorun.inf
- Ravmon.exe
- New Folder.exe
- svchost.exe
- Heap41a
- or any other exe file which may be suspicious.
If any of the above files are there, then probably the USB drive is infected. In command prompt type attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter. This will remove the Read Only, Archive, System and hidden file attribute from all the files. Now just delete the files using the command del filename. example del Ravmon.exe. Delete all the files that are suspicious. To be on a safer side, just scan the USB drive with an anti virus program to check whether it is free of virus or not. Now remove the drive and plug it again. In most of the cases, the real culprit turns out to be the “Autorun.inf” file which mostly gets executed when someone clicks Ok in the dialog window which appears above. Thus the infections can spread
Security Tip
Disable the Autoplay feature of USB drives. If you disable the Autoplay feature of USB drives, then there are lesser chances of the virus spreading. A tool which can perform such a function is Tweak UI. Download it from here install it.
Run the program. Now you can disable the Autoplay feature of the removable drives as shown above. By following the above steps, you can keep your USB drives clean. If there are any other methods which you use, then share it with me through comments.
If the virus files are not getting deleted, then please start the pc in safe mode and try these steps. Also i recommend using Nod 32 anitvirus. It successfully detects many of these viruses.
@adrian
That can be due to Ravmon virus . Search the net for its Removal tool and then run it in safe mode. Hope it helps.
My USB device is not functioning becuase of the virus win.exe. The autorun is not functioning also. I am having a hard time removing the virus. Can you help me?
Appreciate if you could advise/ instruct me how remove below kind of virus on my USB…. thanks in advance ….
S3UUPDATED64.dll.vbs
Hi Madhur..i Hav got a virus in my pen drive but it is a folder..I m not able to delete that..cud u pls help!
tks
Hi Madhur..i Hav got a virus in my pen drive but it is in a folder..I m not able to delete that..cud u pls help!
tks
thanks
i was facing problem with USBs
either not a valid win32 application or when clicking the icon of the disk it wont open and ask me the program to open it thanks these steps solve my problem without format
i insert my USB drive then i click start then run and type cmd then type dir/w/a i found kinza.exe file
i type del kinza.exe but it show Could not find i:\kinza.exe
so what should i do
help me
plz
realy super tip… from now onwards i can work with virus free usb
my usb drive has no virus, but sometimes the files cannot open…..what sholud I do?
hello madhur,
how do i remove the virus from my pen drive, ipod without it entering into my system?? since i just formatted my system and if i insert the pen drive am afraid of it coming in again.. thanks!