Hard Drive Is Infected And You Have Very Little Hard Drive Space Left

COMPUTER REPAIR HELP

 Okay so your desktop or laptop computer has become infected and you have hardly any hard drive space left, what do you do ?
 Well for some people they will take it to their nearest computer service center. There is absolutely nothing wrong in doing that. What I find is most customers do not have a clue as to what they should or could do on their own. This does not make them stupid or anything like that. No it just makes them an uninformed person and we all fit into that category at some point in our lives.

Okay so what can you do ? What I would do is determine exactly how much space you have free on your hard drive. If you have a few gigabytes or more you could download free malwarebytes, roguekiller, adwcleaner and JRT junk removal tool. These can be downloaded to a folder and run. Free malwarebytes will have to be installed and updated before you can scan with it. The other programs are executable programs and can be run by clicking on them. They are all available from bleeping.com, which is an excellent website. The best course of action is to run them from the safe mode with networking by pressing the F8 key on the keyboard when the system first boots up. Windows 10 has little different method.
 If you have windows 10 you can enter the safe mode one of two ways. If you can boot into the system right click the start icon in the lower left corner, then click run and type msconfig and press enter. You can then click boot and make sure network has a dot in it. Next click apply and reboot the system. Then you can run the programs to clean the infections.
 The other way to enter the safe mode with networking in windows 10 is to start to reboot the computer, press the power button and hold it until the computer shuts off. Do this two or three times in a row and it should say preparing automatic repair. Now select troubleshooting and you can select start up options. The system will reboot and have choices associated with the F-Keys. Generally pick F5 for safe mode with networking. Next update the programs and run them.

 Now if you are in a situation where you have no more space left on the hard drive you have a few choices. You may clone the existing infected full hard drive to a new larger hard drive. There are some free programs available like mini partition magic or I would suggest buying the current version of Acronis. You will need an extra power connection and sata cable unless you are using a usb dock. Once the cloning is done install the virus cleaning programs and clean the system. There are other programs that can be run as well such as adware removal tool, super antispyware, a-squared, spybot and others. Just make sure they are good programs by checking forums and reviews before installing.

Once the cleaning is done make sure windows updates are working properly. I would then connect the old hard drive as a second drive and use disk management to re-partition and reformat it. It can be used as a back up drive if it is 250gb or larger. I usually recommend 500gb or larger. Otherwise it can be used for data storage.
 If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to leave a comment.