How to Clean Malware with Trend Micro Rescue Disk

If you are lucky, then your existing antivirus product will fend off any malicious threat posed to your PC. You will see a small notification to the effect and that will be all. But if you fall prey to some of the most deceptive malware that combine social engineering and are so stubborn that they easily evade detection in Windows, then you need a special tool to scan and remove these threats. Trend Micro Rescue Disk helps you create a bootable disk using which you can scan your PC for malware and remove them easily. Since Rescue Disk boots into a customized version of Linux, it can search and remove all the persistent or difficult-to-clean security threats that can be hiding deep inside Windows. It works for all Windows versions from XP to Windows 10.

Steps to Create Bootable Trend Micro Rescue Disk:

  1. Download Rescue Disk from http://free.antivirus.com/us/rescue-disk/index.html.
  2. Attach a USB flash disk (pen drive) to your PC. The disk should have at least 128 MB in size. All the data on this disk will be erased, so check and backup the files from this disk before proceeding.
  3. Launch Rescue Disk, and update it if an update is available.Trend Micro Rescue Disk
  4. Select USB Device from the list of devices shown. You can also choose CD or Hard Disk partition but for these you would need a blank CD or any partition on your hard drive.
  5. Select one of the USB pen drives attached to your PC and click Continue. Your existing antivirus protection may interfere in this process, so disable it for a few minutes.Trend Micro Rescue Disk
  6. You will see a message that – “Your Rescue Disk is ready”. Now you can try this USB disk on any PC to scan it for malware.

Steps to Scan a Windows PC for Malware:

  1. Attach the USB rescue disk to your PC and press the Power button.
  2. As soon as you BIOS/UEFI loading, press F12 (or any other supported key to bring up the boot menu).
  3. From the boot menu select USB disk as the boot device.
  4. Select Scan for Security Threats from the Rescue Disk interface.Trend Micro Rescue Disk
  5. Select Full Scan from the list of options. You can also choose Quick Scan, but it is better to go for complete scan of your system.
  6. It will find and remove any detected threats. It will also create an undo file, so that you can rollback the changes made if necessary anytime later.Trend Micro Rescue Disk
  7. If nothing suspicious is detected, then you will see the message – “Trend Micro Rescue Disk did not detect any security threats”.Trend Micro Rescue Disk

Summary: When malware has made deep roots inside Windows operating system files, then it is better to use bootable malware scanner disks such as Trend Micro Rescue Disk. It can look for security threats hidden deep inside your PC and terminate them without booting into Windows.