Cleaning out malware, etc from my external?

[machineman9]

After I got home from my Christmas holiday, I noticed that my computer was  sluggish and parts were breaking. It turns out some bad software got onto it, and it was causing issues - Note, this was not the only issue, but ultimately I needed to upgrade to keep with the demands of the work that I do.

So I backed up all of my files onto my external harddrive, put my new computer into safe mode, and then did a virus scan of the external drive just to try and pick out any other problems. It found a few issues, but do you think I'm now safe to copy my stuff back over?

I have McAfee as a default install (will soon uninstall, no doubt) but also Microsoft Security Essentials, Comodo freeware and Spybot/Malwarebytes. They're not all running at the same time... Comodo is the primary one, and then MSE keeps an eye on anything past that. McAfee, naturally, does nothing despite being active 


Any other scans that I should run? I have not connected my external just yet - I had only plugged it in when I was in safe mode, so that nothing could start up.


Cheers.

[ozzy72]

It is probably worth plugging the drive in and running the scans on it as well in case any nasties survived the purge. It'll take a little time but a heck of a lot easier than unscrambling your PC's brain

[skoker]

I would plug in the external and use malwarebytes to scan first your C: drive then your external.  I had a similar problem and that made it all better.

[machineman9]

Well I've run a lot of those programs with the harddrive connected, whilst my OS was in safe mode (so that the nasties can't run around the place) and it seemed to find most of it.

My C drive should be clean, this computer is only a day old... But it is a Dell