Some MS Word and PDF documents are infected by virus, worm, spyware, trojan etc.
Is it possible to CLEAN infected Windows Document files / PDF using Linux LiveCD?

My idea:
1. Use Linxu LiveCD with OpenOffice.
This version of open office can read/write MS Word Document.
2. The LiveCD can read/write NTFS or FAT partition.
3. Read the infected MS Word document using open office.
4. Write the document using new OpenOffice format.
5. Delete the old infected MS Word files.
6. Convert the OpenOffice format to MS Word document format.

For PDF:
1. Convert infected PDF to Postscript using PDF2PS.
2. Delete the old infected PDF file.
3. Convert the Postscript to PDF using PS2PDF.

Is the above idea possible?
Can this method clean every malware on the document file?

Thank you.

Well, ClamAV doesn't have support for cleaning infected files last time I checked, but I would imagine some closed-source proprietary GNU/Linux anti-virus products do. If you find one, you could just add it to the live CD (as long as you aren't violating the license agreement).

Well, this idea is a completely different approach than using an anti-virus like you first described. I think your idea sounds really weird in theory (at least to me), but should actually work in practice, at least in cases where the information you want hasn't been corrupted by the infection. If you desperately need to access the information in an infected document then using a live CD is definitely one way to do it. However, I'd suggest disconnecting your hard drive and stuff so that you don't risk affecting your real installation in case there's more to the infected file than a Windows-only virus. Having your network firewall isolate the box you are doing this on might also be a good idea.

Some time ago I was talking to my computer supplier about Window viruses and he told me that there is not one virus scanner
for windows who can detect and destroy all viruses ,malware and so on He said if you like to be sure that you,re computer
is totally free of all that nasty stuff run two or three virus scanner I really do not know if he is right or not


all the best

Isn't the easy version of what you are trying to do in approach (1) just to strip out any macros in word docs? My virus knowledge is pretty poor, but I thought infested office docs had macro issues rather than text problems.

On the accuracy issue, I've never seen one of those side-by-side reviews/tests of virus checkers get what I'd call all that close to 100% The odd one is in the 90's and generall downhill from there.

Because this thread is about fixing infected Windows files I've moved it to General. I'll leave a redirect in Security for a couple weeks, however, as even though this deals primarily with Windows, the methods chosen by the OP do involve GNU/Linux - albeit indirectly.