How to remove virus from usb drive manually

Removing flash drive virus.

The USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a removable device and it has been out for a little while, it`s basic function is to store information and files from computers.It has become so popular because of it`s hot swappable nature meaning that you can plug it into your usb port on your computer to take information and plug out at anytime.Today`s usb devices has storage capacities ranging from 1 gigabyte (GB) to as much as 512 gigabyte (GB) and even more, that`s alot of space to play with.

With it`s nature of being a portable device and moving from computer to computer transfering and moving information, usb flash drives can tend to pick up viruses and malwares.These can be very troublesome as some of these virus tend to infect your files and folders and spread to other computers and from there to other flashdrives that they gets into contact with.What i have experienced personally is that some of these flashdrive virus they tend to hide themselves on the usb device volume and although you may have an updated antivirus software running it may just quaranteen the infected file and will be unable to delete it because of the virus`s file attributes.So what does that tell you ?, the file was quaranteen by the antivirus but it still resides on the flash drive.In this post i will detail the steps necessary to remove a undeletable virus from your usb flash drive.

Here are the steps

1. First when you plug your usb flash drive into your computer and the dialog box comes up, click cancel.
2.Go to my computer icon ->right click and open the flashdrive
3.Here are a few of the suspicious files that you are looking for: autorun.inf, cftmon.exe, ravmon.exe, newfolder.exe, svchost.exe or any suspicious file.
4.If they are there well then the drive is infected and you need to remove the infected file.

Here is what you should do:

1.Start ->run -> type cmd -> type attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter.
What this basically does is removes the read only, archive, system and hidden file attributes on the files so that the virus or the container of virus will be shown.

2.Within the command prompt you will run the delete command to delete these suspicious files as the are shown up, example type del Autorun.inf or del New Folder.exe.

3.When you have finished doing that unplug your flash drive, update your anti-virus and scan your entire system.

4.Last but not least plug back your flashdrive into your computer and scan it with your anti-virus.

Viruses on flash drives are usually spread because windows has the Autorun feature set automatically run by default and this needs to be disabled.Here is the easiest and fastest way by far to disable the autorun feature.

1.Download Disable_autorun.reg registry key.
2.Click Save to your computer ->Rigt click on file -> click run
3.Click Yes to confirm addition to the registry

What does this do?

This disables the usb autorun feature and it will prevent any virus from automatically being
lauched whenever a usb flashdrive is plugged into your computer.