Can I safely use Avast! to clean an infected disk?

[wdc202]

 I have a diskette with a little program (for finding prime numbers) that worked fine in my DOS 2 pc but won’t run in DOS on my W95 pc. Apparently, it has become infected. The Norton AV on the W95 pc tells me the program is infected with Datalock.920 and Norton has quarantined it.,

I’d like to import the program to my W98 and XP pcs (each with DOS). Can I safely use the Avast! AV program (the free Home edition) on my W98 pc to clean out the virus? Or is that risky? How is the best way to do the cleaning?

Thanks.

[DavidR]

Do you also have Norton on these other systems ?
If so this could be a major pain in the rear, as Norton would have to be removed before installing a second AV and Norton can be a real pig to remove and can cause conflicts with subsequent AV installations.

If you already have avast then no problem.
If the program is on floppy disc then there should be no need to import it unless it needs to be installed, just scan the floppy disk using either the ashQuick (right click context menu) scan or use the on-demand scanner to scan removable media.

You could also check the offending/suspect file at: VirusTotal - Multi engine on-line virus scanner I feel virustotal is the better option as it uses the windows version of avast (more packers supported) and there are currently 32 different scanners.
Or Jotti - Multi engine on-line virus scanner if any other scanners here detect them it is less likely to be a false positive. Whichever scanner you use, you can't do this with the file in quarantine, you will need to move it out.

Datalock is a fairly old virus, circa 2000 and avast only has two signatures for it, Datalock and Datalock-1470 but there is no standardisation or convention for naming viruses. You may be better trying one of the on-line scanners. On-line Virus Scanners and other useful Links Security-Ops.eu.tt

[Lisandro]

I would suggest that you first install avast in a clean computer, update it, and scans the floppy which NAV thoughts was infected..., like David said, no need to 'import'.

[polonus]

Hi wdc202,

Here is the cleansing information: http://www.spywaredb.com/remove-datalock-920-a/

http://wiw.org/~meta/vsum/view.php?vir=372

We see a return of these file infector droppers.....

polonus