[;)]On Saturday, the hubs stopped by a coupon site that had a nasty virus and rendered our Dell Inspiron unbootable. He had to do a hard shut down. After that, it never booted into windows again. It limped along for a few hours while I was able to run diagnostics, which reported a failing hard drive, and then eventually it completely puttered out and wouldn't boot at all. Sometime during this process, though I can't remember when, the external hard drive we use for backing up was unplugged. (So yes, I have an external hard drive and was using it for automatic backups, so I have the ability to restore files.)
Rather than take any chances, I ordered a new hard drive and installed it today, and now windows 10 is finished installing.
So I've installed new hard drives before, but have never suffered a virus attack like this.
The question, then what should I do about restoring files from the external hard drive? I used McAfee (which was running at the time of the attack) to scan the external hard drive and it found nothing. (then again, it didn't stop the attack, either).
Is it safe to restore files from file history? (Or alternatively to use the windows 7 version of restoring)?
What's the best, safest way to proceed in order to make sure we don't get reinfected?