I want to check that an external USB hard disk drive is free of viruses and malware before connecting it to my primary use computer.
I have it in mind to perform the following steps to ensure that the drive is effectively clean:
- remove the HDD from an old laptop
- boot from a Linux CD, known to be clean
- connect the USB HDD
- open terminal
- navigate to the USB HDD directory
- enter the
ls -a
command - delete any files or directories that I cannot account for
After taking these steps, should I be able to assume that my USB HDD is completely safe to use?
(Notes: Unfortunately, I am not familiar with running virtual machines, and obviously, I don't trust third-party software scans to do a good enough job of detecting everything for me.)
UPDATE:
Here is some more background information:
Yesterday, I bought a brand new 1TB USB HDD, which was NTFS formatted out of the box. I purchased it to backup files from my MacBook, which according to Avira and MBAM, was free of unwanted infections.
After connecting the USB HDD, the first thing that I did was to reformat it to utilize the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system, and afterwards, I copied my files to the drive.
Then, I erased the hard drive on the MacBook and installed a fresh copy of OS X via Internet Recovery.
If Avira and MBAM failed to catch anything, how can I make certain that I won't be reintroducing anything unwanted when I connect the USB HDD to my newly reformatted machine?