Virus on old harddrive

[Deadlife129]

I have an old sony viao laptop from 2009-2010 time frame. It ended up getting a virus on it around that same time frame and now it will not go past the boot up screen regardless of how I try to use it (via normal boot or safe mode). I have some old pictures on it of my daughter that I don't have saved anywhere else. On my current laptop I have McAfee virus protection. I have a hard drive reader so I can remove the hard drive from the old laptop and plug it into my current laptop and either remove the virus with my virus protection or just get my pictures off of it. Before I go and do this, I was hoping to get a second opinion on it in case it is a bad idea. Thank you in advance for your time.

[Princess Luna]

Mcafee is a very shitty antivirus, you can try booting from this HDD in safe mode with network and download http://combofix.org/

in order to remove the virus, common virus like what you probably got there can not harm your hardware so essentially is fine trying out.

[Deadlife129]

Thank you for your response. I was going to try something similar to that but unfortunately the laptop will not boot even in safe mode.

 

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

You could take the risk, plug it into that new laptop and pray that McAfee does its work.  But you may end up infecting the new laptop.

 

You could also use the new laptop to make a bootable Linux stick, which would allow you to boot the old laptop into Linux, copy the photos to the stick itself (or to another stick) and recover your files that way. 

Making a bootable Linux stick isn't hard really, here's how to do it.

[Deadlife129]

That worked! Thank you!!!