Are Antivirus Rescue Drives Obsolete?

For many years I've had a (Kaspersky) antivirus rescue utility on a USB flash drive. The idea is that you have something you can boot to that will (hopefully) remove malware when the malware has made your computer unbootable.

I have never needed to use it, fortunately, but just for the heck of it I decided to boot my computer from the flash drive to see what it does. Good idea that, since I discovered that the Kaspersky AV rescue utility doesn't work on my new computer. (Kaspersky knows about it, and won't do anything about it 'cause it's a free utility. But this is not about Kaspersky.)

Looking around for a replacement I realized that there are very few of these remaining. Most of the big names in antivirus software stopped updating the rescue drives. Thus my question:

Are antivirus rescue drives obsolete?

TBH, if my computer was hit by malware, I would probably restore a backup rather than try to rescue it. So maybe AV rescue drives really are obsolete.

mse ( aka defender offline ) works in my win7 pe



eset runs off usb stick when booted into win10/11 pe. Needs pe with 32 bit support and a bit of pescratch space to download definitions about 300mb.

plonk it on the usb stick and it will download the latest defintions when run

I don't think they are obsolete. If you have something like a rootkit, what else would you do?

BulldogX said:

TBH, if my computer was hit by malware, I would probably restore a backup

Click to expand...

That's the ticket. ^^

In most cases, Anti-virus rescue disks/drives can be put to other uses like fault finding/fixing, so I doubt they would ever be labelled obsolete.

As already noted, restoring from backup is often the best solution.

Haven't used an offline scanner in years for anyone else. It's an automatic clean install as it's the only way of me guaranteeing they are 100% clean with all the zero day crap out in the wild these days. I've never been infected myself but if I ever was I'd be back in business in 15 minutes. That's the beauty of having a regular backup routine.

Win10 custom pe












It downloads the latest definitions here

Thanks for everyone's ideas. I have decided to forgo an AV rescue disk and rely instead on my backups.

Cybersecurity is a particular interest of mine, and I learned that a computer that has been compromised by malware can no longer be trusted, even if you are able to recover from the attack.

BulldogX said:

Thanks for everyone's ideas. I have decided to forgo an AV rescue disk and rely instead on my backups.

Cybersecurity is a particular interest of mine, and I learned that a computer that has been compromised by malware can no longer be trusted, even if you are able to recover from the attack.

Click to expand...

The only way to regain trust in computer is to clean reload OS.
Don't trust anything else and you'll be much safer.