I am a newbie in linux so everything i ask, please explain as if i don't know anything. (Thanks)

I am very enthralled by knoppix because i do not have linux on my machine and I soon want to move to linux. But I have a friend who has Microsoft XP and He has a virus, which i can't find much on.

What it does:

He starts his computer up and at the log on screen there is his logon and there is a new logon that the virus made called "support" Now when he tries to log in on his name, the computer just restarts. The support logon is password protected and he can't do anything with that.

Now he does not want to reformat his computer which i told him he probably will have to do. he has 2 hard drives 120 and a 80 and he thinks the 120 is infect and not the 80 but isn't sure. So I put knoppix in and we got into his computer on that OS and he wants to move the files that he wants on to the 80 gig (I told him all the files he tries to move maybe infected and will be pointless but with knoppix he could do that)

Now what my question is, I would like to know if i can logon with knoppix and virus check his Windows XP but when i look around i only see Virus checkers for Linux, and even with that I have no idea how to install them on a regular Linux OS and how the heck would i install it with Knoppix rather than making a whole new CD (plus i would have no idea how to make the new CD with the virus checker on it)

so I am looking for a virus checker that will run in knoppix (linux) and be able to check Windows XP and destroy and contain the virus that is haunting my friend.
Thank you,
Bryon

I'm not sure if Knoppix has the clam-Anti-Virus package....

Try to use "clamscan -r /"

That's the one i'm using and i'm satisfied with it... *smiles*
Found a few viri with that in files that was viri-free according to Norton at least..

You may possibly be able to do it if you have 2 windows machines that can be networked together. Use a clean one with an AV on it and map a drive letter to \\<friend_ip>\c$ . c$ is an adminstrative share in NT and up. It is the whole c drive. Some antivirus scanners will let you scan a mapped drive. If yours can then do that.

To answer another question, if your friend has formatted his drives with NTFS then you will have a problem. Knoppix cannot write to NTFS. Only read. So if you do find a virus then you can't do a whole lot with it. It will even be a problem if you try to copy data to another drive if it is formatted with NTFS.

Thank you so much, benjithegreat! I was wondering why i couldn't touch the hardrives on his computer even though i had write enabled! Well... that sucks.. I felt that knoppix was great at fixing computers that have trouble. (I don't reall know how it would, since im not that bright in the computers area.) So this isn't really a Linux question but does anyone konw what i should do? with his computer? does "Madrakemove" write to NTFS? or any other Boot Cds that could do the job? And where could i get them?
Thanks,
Bryon Holdt

Why don't you start up the xp machine in safe mode and run an anti-virus program from there? Then you can make backups or move any files that you want to keep, before formatting. Although, I would not feel too safe about those files.