By Bill Grogg

You've had your system infected with a virus and only found out when it caused some damage to your files and displayed an obnoxious message. What do you do now? How can you rid your system of all remnants of the virus and restore the health of your system?

First, cold boot your system (power it off, then back on), booting from a known clean, write-protected boot disk.

Next, run your anti-virus scanner to detect and remove the virus from your files and boot sectors. If the virus isn't found and removed by your scanner, you might want to try a second anti-virus product (see Selecting Anti-Virus Software).

Once you are certain that the virus has been removed, it is a good idea to run a disk utility to verify that no other damage has been done to your file system.

Finally, restore any damaged files from your latest backup. Since virus-infected files can be backed up, scan any restored files to make sure that they, too, are clean.