avast! antivirus is one of the premier security products available today for Windows, Linux and Android devices. In addition to the paid commercial version, avast! is also available in a free edition. But in both editions, it provides excellent protection from malware, rootkits, trojans and viruses. If you have avast! antivirus installed on one of your Windows computers, then you should create an avast! Rescue Disk. This avast! antivirus Rescue Disk comes handy when your computer is infected with some malware or rootkit and you are unable to boot from it. When using the Rescue Disk, you do not boot from Windows but from a different operating system present on the Rescue Disk and thus can remove malware that prevent installation or downloading of any anti-malware utility.
Here is how you can create the avast! antivirus Rescue Disk:
- Open the avast! antivirus interface by double-clicking on its notification area icon (system tray icon).
- In the avast! interface, select Tools and then Rescue Disk from the left side menu panel.
- The Rescue Disk can be created either on the USB drive or on a blank CD/DVD. You should insert the type of media that you want and click on the appropriate button (USB or CD) to proceed.
- If you choose to create the Rescue Disk on a blank CD, then it would ask you where to save the ISO file. If you choose the USB, then it would ask you which USB drive to create it on. In both cases, it will download the toolkit to create the Rescue Disk from the internet. This can take some time on slower internet connections.
- After the toolkit has been downloaded and installed on your system, it will proceed with the creation of the Rescue Disk. In the end, you would be shown a message that Rescue Disk creation was successful.
avast! Rescue Disk is a bootable media. It includes the latest avast! antivirus definitions (latest at the time of creation). You can boot from it, scan and clean your infected systems with it. It can be used in situations when you are infected with a rootkit and do not want to load it (rootkits load with Windows) before scanning.