Pesky viruses and trojans from using USB's @ school / Uni

[h2o]

In our household, we all have assignments which we take to school / Uni for submission and have brought back evils like Recycler, etc.

I have one particular pen-drive which has a Design Project Presentation on it. I dare not open my files on this drive bcos there is a warning of the threat. Can I 'clean' this drive and retrieve my files?

[kwimango]

yes you can - these viruses/trojans usually exploit the autorun functionality on Windows computers
1) before you plug in your USB, turn off the Autoplay functionality (check out the many ways u can do it at http://www.tildemark.com/tips/disable-autorun-on-cdrom-or-usb-drives.html)
2) make sure you have antivirus software on your computer!! that way, if your thumb drive is really infected, it would be able to clean it
3) email the files to yourself as attachments rather than saving them in a thumb drive

lastly, if you know how these viruses work and which files are infected (i.e: the autorun.inf file), you can pop your thumbdrive into a mac or linux machine and delete them before they cause any damage

[h2o]

thx kwi ur a lifesaver