Hello
I have Avast free edition installed on my Asus ep 121 tablet on windows 7 OS.
After many many months of 0 virus incidents on my tablet, after a recent update Avast found a suspicious file and it recommended that I do a boot -time scan. That file was probably a false-positive, as it was a program that I've been using for more than a year with avast running and it never did anything suspicious ; but I decided to do a boot time scan anyway, just to be safe.
So I did comply, let the computer restart, and when scanning during boot-up it found a file and it asked me what to do with it by offering options I could select by pressing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 or Escape on the keyboard.
Asus ep121 is a tablet and does not have a keyboard, so I was stuck there.
I tried attaching as USB keyboard at that time to bypass this but it did not work (in my experience, the keyboard would have had to be connected wither at start-up to be recognized, or after windows7 has finished booting) .
Not having any other option I decided to power off/power on the tablet (if the keyboard was connected at boot time it would see it and I could bypass the boot time scan).
On reboot though the tablet remained with the black screen (this was unexpected, I expected a regular boot...).
I went to the Asus site and looked up if there are any emergency recovery procedures.
I started the tablet with an USB keyboard plugged in , and accessed the Boot Setup, ejected the SD card i had plugged in the tablet's card reader, re-selected the onboard SSD as boot device and only then it started ( telling that windows has failed to load on previous boot yadda yadda).
Ay any rate, please write a big warning before Avast requires the restart for a boot scan , that on boot scan you must have a keyboard connected or there's a risk of messing up the boot procedure on your tablet so other people don't go through what I just did.
Alternately make the scanner also accept input from up/down arrow keys and Enter, like the windows boot menu (on EP 121 the Home button doubles as Enter and volume buttons double as up down arrow keys in DOS mode when there's no actual keyboard connected, so the tablet can communicate with the windows boot menu... the Avast boot time scanner could do the same ).
Best regards,
Dragos
