In spite of your best attempts, your system may get infected by a virus or some other malicious programs. Viruses need to be gotten rid of, to restore the system to its previous working state. Removing the virus from the system may be quite simple, or even amazingly difficult, depending upon the methods deployed to remove them. You may also come across data loss when your system gets affected by a virus. Data loss may be permanent or reversible. Mostly, Data Recovery Software can help recover all your lost data.

Most of the virus scanners use virus definition files to scan the system for viruses and deploy several algorithms for removing different types of viruses, and fix all the damage caused by them. However, in some cases, though the anti-virus detects the virus, it can not remove the virus from the system. In such situations, the system remains affected and is prone to many critical problems.

One should bear in mind that there is a possibility of false positive, i.e., the anti-virus application may identify a normal file as a virus, even though it may not be so. Always make sure that the file that has been marked by the virus scanner, as a virus, is actually so, before trying to remove it, or you make the situation more critical.

When a virus infects the boot sector of your system, it can be removed simply by rewriting the boot sector code, which resides on the hard drive. This can be done manually, by anyone. To do this, boot the system with a clean floppy and use “FDISK /MBR” command for rewriting boot sector code.

However, this solution is not ideal for all cases. Sometimes, viruses cause a lot of damage that has to be undone using a program created specifically to repair the damage done by the virus and can handle the situation properly. The “FDISK /MBR” command, though very useful, in most of the critical situations, can only wipe the virus, but not fix the damage done by the virus.

But, there are situations, where even these programs fail. In such situations, hard drive formatting is required to remove the virus. But, formatting removes all the data too. However, this is a trivial problem, and can be fixed using Data Recovery Software. These software extract lost data from all the sectors of the hard drive by perform in-depth scan of the affected hard drive. Any high-end data recovery tool comes equipped with simple and interactive user interface, which eases Data Recovery, and helps even first-time users to extract their data. A data extracting software, should be read-only and non-destructive in nature, as such a software would ensure integrity of the original data.

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This post is written by K Madhav, he works with Stellar Information Systems Limited, which is the the foremost provider of world-class recovery applications to deal with all types of logical data loss situations. The recovery software are specialized and available for different operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX, Linux, and Novell.