How to Remove Virus from USB Device

usb-drive-virusUSB Drives has become very popular as data storage and also as a backup device mainly because of it’s versatility, flexibility and size. But USB devices are very prone to virus infection and virus use your USB device to infect your computer. The common viruses are Autorun.inf, New Folder.exe, Ravmon. Unfortunately most antivirus fails to detect and remove these type of viruses. In most cases antiviruses are unable to delete them, only quarantine it. If your antivirus is unable to remove the virus from  USB device here is the procedure to remove the pesky virus manually.

Whenever you plug a USB drive in your computer, a window will appear (if your autorun is enabled).

Don’t click on Ok , just choose ‘Cancel’.

Open your command prompt. Type ‘cmd’ in the run box or on the search panel if you are using vista

In the command prompt type the drive letter of your usb device and press enter. ex. C:\F: <— then press enter

Type dir /w/a and press enter. ex F:\ dir /w/a <— then press enter

This will display a list of the files in in your flash drive. Check if the following files present on your USB device.

* Autorun.inf
* Ravmon.exe
* New Folder.exe
* svchost.exe
* Heap41a
* or any other exe file that you find suspicious.

If you spotted any of the above files, then most probably your drive is infected.

To remove the virus, type in to your command prompt “attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter. This will remove the Read Only, Archive, System and hidden file attribute from all the files.

To delete the virus just type del and the filename ex. F:\del virus.exe and hit enter.Delete all the files that you suspected is a virus. After deleting the virus, run a virus scan on your USB device just to make sure that your device is clean.

Remove the USB drive and plug it again. In most cases, the real culprit is  “Autorun.inf” file which gets executed when someone clicks Ok in the dialog window which appears above. Thus the infections can spread. Here is the way to remove autorun.inf and prevent virus spreading and infection.