Most antivirus rescue disks are supplied in the disk ISO format and need to be burned to CD or DVD. Kaspersky recently started to offer the Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk Maker which, as the name suggests, can create a bootable rescue disk on an USB flash drive.

Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 is designed to scan and disinfect x86 and x64-compatible computers that have been infected. The application should be used when the infection is so severe that it is impossible to disinfect the computer using anti-virus applications or malware removal utilities (such as Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool) running under the operating system.

Two downloads are necessary to create the bootable Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk:

• The most recent ISO image of Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 [link]
• The Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk Maker [link]

The USB device needs to use the FAT16 or FAT32 file system, and not NTFS.

To create the bootable USB rescue disk do the following:

• Install Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk Maker on the PC.
• Browse to the ISO image of the Kaspersky Rescue Disk in the program interface after startup, and select one of the connected USB devices. This device will be used to create the bootable rescue disk.

kaspersky usb rescue disk

A click on Start copies the relevant files from the ISO image to the USB drive.

It is important to test the USB rescue device at least once, to make sure that it will work in emergencies. It is usually necessary to enable booting from removable devices in the BIOS, so that the boot process picks up the USB rescue disk before the actual operating system(s) on the hard drive.

Kaspersky’s Rescue Disk can be used to disinfect systems that have been rendered unbootable by a virus and in scenarios where it is not possible to disinfect the virus while the operating system is running.

It is naturally also possible to burn the ISO image to CD or DVD, if that is preferred.

The approach has a few advantages but also a disadvantage. The advantage is obviously that you can use it to remove known viruses, trojans, worms and other malicious software even if the computer cannot be booted into the operating system anymore. And since it is a standalone client it is not dependent on an installed anti-virus client but can be used on any computer that can be booted from CD. This also means that the program is independent from the installed operating system.

The disadvantage of the approach is that the virus definitions cannot be updated that easily and that it normally means that the full boot disk would have to be downloaded and burned to CD again meaning that this would have to be done regularly to stay up to date.

The good news is that you can download the Kaspersky Rescue Disk freely from an Kaspersky FTP and burn it to CD or DVD using a CD burning software like Nero.

The computer has to boot from the media and the boot sequence can be set in the computer BIOS. Make sure that the computer checks the DVD drive for a bootable device before it pulls the data from the hard drives.

The interface of the Rescue Disk is straightforward. It basically allows you to scan the computer for malicious software and offers ways to remove any that are found. This does not give a guarantee that the computer can be booted again after the cleanup though. A damaged file normally does not get repaired by anti-virus software.