How To: Scan a Hard Drive with Fedora 8 Live CD

I had downloaded the i386 version of the Fedora 8 Live CD. Since I already had it downloaded and burned to a CD, I decided to use this to scan a laptop’s drive for viruses. There is probably an easier way, but I thought this would be a good exercise.

Once booted, open a terminal and run the following commands:

su -
yum install gcc zlib zlib-devel make


Then, I downloaded clamav from the SourceForge website. The version I downloaded was 0.92rc2. Firefox automatically saves files to the Desktop, and so, I just let it do its thing.

Next, back in the terminal window, I compiled the program:

cd /home/fedora/Desktop
tar -xzvvf clamav*.tar.gz
cd clamav*
useradd clamav
./configure
make
make install


Then, I had to update the configuration files. You can do this from the terminal with:

freshclam
sed -e 's/^Example$/#Example/i' /usr/local/etc/freshclam.conf > freshclam.conf
mv -f freshclam.conf /usr/local/etc/freshclam.conf
sed -e 's/^Example$/#Example/i' /usr/local/etc/clamd.conf > clamd.conf
mv -f clamd.conf /usr/local/etc/clamd.conf


Next, download the most recent virus definitions.

freshclam


Finally, do your scan (You may need to mount it first).

clamscan /media/disk