Update your Kaspersky Rescue Disk automatically

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 21, 2013
Security
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Rescue discs are great as they provide you with the means to troubleshoot your computer if you cannot boot in to the installed operating systems anymore. Some rescue disks ship with an arsenal of repair tools to resolve the issue, while others are more specialized. Kaspersky's Rescue Disk falls into the latter category as it has been designed to remove malicious programs and the effects of those programs on the system.

The tool is provided as an ISO image that you need to burn to disc or copy to an USB Flash Drive to make use of it. Once done, you'd boot from the device or disc whenever you need to. One of the issues here is that the rescue disk becomes less useful with age as the program itself and the included virus definition database are not updated automatically. While you can download the ISO image regularly and repeat the process, it is not really something that is well suited as a manual task. Plus, downloading the whole ISO image every time wastes a lot of bandwidth as you will not only download updated files but also all other files that have not been updated in the meantime.

The Kaspersky Rescue Disk Updater helps you automate the process to a certain degree. It works best if you have copied the Rescue Disk to an USB drive as you can update the files stored on that drive easily.

Here is how it works.  Download the Rescue Disk Updater file from Github and make sure you also have the latest available version of the Kaspersky Rescue Disk at hand (you need the ISO). Copy the ISO image in to the Rescue Disk Updater directory. Rename the iso image to rescue.iso and start the diskupdt.bat file afterwards.

kaspersky rescue disk updater

The batch file extracts the contents of the ISO image and starts to download the latest virus definition files from a Kaspersky server. It replaces the current files and definitions with the updated ones and creates two updated iso images in the end.

Note: depending on your set up, you may need to run the batch file with elevated privileges.

kaspersky rescue disk

All that is left to do now is to copy the two files to the rescue folder of the USB flash drive holding the rescue disk. We are not done yet as there is still room for improvement. Here are two suggestions to automate the process even further. I have not tried those but they should work out fine.

  1. Copy the Kaspersky Rescue Disk Updater files to the rescue folder on the USB drive and run them from there. This removes the need to copy the resulting files to the USB drive in the end, as they are created on the USB drive right away. This works best if the drive is fast enough for these operations. to be completed in an acceptable time frame.
  2. Try adding the batch file to the Task Scheduler so that it runs automatically once a week, day or even multiple times a day.
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Comments

  1. Kimmy K said on February 9, 2017 at 6:30 am
    Reply

    Shheeezes.
    Why can’t Kaspersky just save to updated definitions to the USB flash drive?
    Done.

    We spend *DAYS* checking all the computers we have company-wide…. because the definitions are always
    17,000 days old.

  2. Tammy T said on February 7, 2017 at 6:18 pm
    Reply

    Why not just use Easy2Boot?
    Your Kaspersky updates are stored directly to the USB drive everytime.
    Never a need to fill up the target computer’s harddrive.

  3. Hawk said on June 13, 2013 at 3:50 pm
    Reply

    Awesome tip! Thank you.

  4. Deepanker said on April 22, 2013 at 3:21 pm
    Reply

    Thanks for this useful tip.. Rescue tools are really useful

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