Risk of using old external HD?
I have an external hard drive from years ago that has a ton of music and photos I’d like, but the computer I was using at the time is was questionable, I believe there was some kinda virus/malware going on. I plan on getting a Mac Book soon, should I be worried about hooking the HD up and pulling the files off? Some of these music files go back to Limewire days
Answers
NO YOU CAN TRY BY ACTIVATING Kapersky security Backup多
There is always a potential that hard drives might contain malware. Plugging them in and navigating through the files and folders may infect your current machine if the drive itself is infected by a worm.
Sandboxes tend to give people a false sense of security. E.g. malware has still access to your data if you run it in Sandboxie and might steal your credentials. Some malware can also escape sandboxes and infect the host system. If there is a high risk of a file being malware I wouldn't execute it in a sandbox either.
Formatting the drive is the safest way here. It doesn't matter how many partitions you have. You can join them if you want.
Alternatively you can take the time to scan the whole drive with your antivirus and show us the result (a log of all detections) so we can see if it found anything worrysome like worms or file infectors.
You say there are hack tools on the drive. These will be detected by AV scanners even if they are "clean" because they fall under the categories riskware and grayware. You should remove those files too if they are found by the scanner, but they are not as critical as other malware detections are.
HOPE IT HELPS YOU.