What's the best anti-virus software out there that's either free or paid that's good at removing viruses from hard drives thoroughly.

The reason why I ask is because I had to put a replacement hard drive from one of my hard drives into a caddy because it got infected with a virus that's preventing it from booting up so what I want to do is connect it to my spare laptop so I can use anti-virus software to remove any viruses/spyware/malware.

Moved to Software General.

cheers ...

Hum, in terms of general use I always go with Kaspersky or Nod32- although kaspersky has been pissing me off recently in the newest versions. For your use, I'd recommend GData anti-virus because it has ridiculously high detection rates, using multiple av engines. But be careful it does flag lots of clean files in the process.

GData sounds promising although I'm worried that it flags some clean files as ones with viruses... Is there any way of telling if files that are flagged as having viruses really do have them or if it's flagged by mistake?

Really when I see a false positive i'll resubmit the file to http://virusscan.jotti.org/. If the only thing it returns is stuff like Generic.trojan or whatever, it's probably a false positive. Ideally though you should be able to kinda guess if the file would be a prime trojan/virus target (like core windows .dll's).

http://virusscan.jotti.org/en/scanre...5a18279e2b86be

This is the results I got from a scan I did of a important RAR file of mine and it says that 19 out of 21 scanners reported it as malware while 2 reported it as clean.

Does that mean that the ones that reported it as clean are telling the truth or are they lying?

Looks like a false positive. Cause it says "Joke..." it means it looks like a virus but really isn't.

Dr/Owned is right.

Kaspersky / Nod32 are by far the best paid anti-viruses out there. Not only do they have high detection rates but they are kept up to date with the lowest memory footprints. I would stay away from Norton/Mcfee. Trend/Panda are decent Anti-virus, however I get way too many false positives. Panda I believe tried to tell me once that my copy (legal and paid for) of Dreamweaver /Flash studios was infected.

For Free Antivirus I would take a look at AVG or Avast. While they may not be as nice as say Kaspersky/Nod32 they do a very good job of detection and trying to keep your computer clean and free.