Malicious software, like viruses or trojans, can damage a system in a way that it becomes impossible to boot into the operating system that was infected by the software. The Kaspersky Rescue Disk is a standalone bootable CD that can be used to scan the system for malicious software without having to boot into the operating system first.

The approach has a few advantages but also a disadvantage. The advantage is obviously that you can use it to remove known viruses, trojans, worms and other malicious software even if the computer cannot be booted into the operating system anymore. And since it is a standalone client it is not dependent on an installed anti-virus client but can be used on any computer that can be booted from CD. This also means that the program is independent from the installed operating system.

The disadvantage of the approach is that the virus definitions cannot be updated that easily and that it normally means that the full boot disk would have to be downloaded and burned to CD again meaning that this would have to be done regularly to stay up to date.

The good news is that you can download the Kaspersky Rescue Disk freely from an Kaspersky FTP and burn it to CD or DVD using a CD burning software like Nero.

The computer has to boot from the media and the boot sequence can be set in the computer BIOS. Make sure that the computer checks the DVD drive for a bootable device before it pulls the data from the hard drives.

The interface of the Rescue Disk is straightforward. It basically allows you to scan the computer for malicious software and offers ways to remove any that are found. This does not give a guarantee that the computer can be booted again after the cleanup though. A damaged file normally does not get repaired by anti-virus software.