Troubleshooting a Trojan/Virus attack on your Laptop

Yesterday night my neighbor brough his Virus infected Laptop to me & told me that he has got critical data which he needs from the Laptop & that I should help him at any cost. I thus followed the standard procedure of starting the Laptop & checking for possible signs of Virus/Trojan infections. When I found some, I instantly started looking out for solutions on the Net. Though most of the solutions seemed technically correct & acceptable to me none worked out completely as some traces of the Virus always remained somewhere & things had to be repeated again & again. Since the Laptop was not covered under warranty, I had the freedom to tweak around with it.

In handling a situation as described above the best option is to get the infected Laptop Hard disk getting cleaned externally. To do so you require the following items:

1. An external USB Hard disk casing with an associated USB cable.
2. A PC/Laptop with Net connectivity & good updated Antivirus application.
3. Some good tools to remove Spyware, Trojans & Viruses.
4. Good Hardware knowledge.

Procedure to do the troubleshooting:

1. Turn off power from the infected Laptop & look out for the Hard disk compartment.
2. Detach the Hard disk from the Laptop & connect it to the external USB casing.
3. Connect the USB casing to the PC containing updated Antivirus application. In most cases the Antivirus application would immediately detect the virus & clean it. Else run some required Security tools freely available on the Net to clean all malicious data from the USB Hard disk.
4. Once you are sure that the Hard disk has been completely cleaned, attach it once again to your Laptop.

I used this technique to clean the Noooh virus from the Laptop & things worked out perfectly. If you are the one facing a Virus infection currently, why don't you try out.