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iMac infected with virus - seeking best approach to cure.

We have a user who has reported a virus in their iMac. The details I have our sketchy and I don’t have the specific symptoms other than that they shut down the iMac in fear that data loss would occur.

In the PC world I would know exactly what to do, i.e. first remove the drive and mount it as a secondary drive to remove the essential data, but how do I approach this in the Mac world where I can’t easily open the device to get to the drive?

Is there a mode where I can safely copy data to a USB hard drive before I get to work on it? (Of course I will educate the user to the benefits of backup afterwards.
Any other general tips on the approaching this are appreciated.

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Happy Tohelp

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Happy Tohelp

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strung

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Frosty555

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afflik1923

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Will update soon. We have the Mac in our office now.

afflik1923

ASKER

OK. A new thread was started on this so feel free to comment on this:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28247047/Virus-on-Mac.html

Thanks as always.

afflik1923

ASKER

In the end this was the anti virus software being out of date, I believe a few bad sectors on the disk etc. once we done general update and maintenance the issue was resolved. The AV software was effectively reporting normal files as viruses.