Question about viruses on discs...

[Grapefruitologist]

Hi,
I thought I'd ask before I acctually did it.
Awhile ago, I bought a new computer. My old computer had a virus on it, that was uncurable "unless it was wiped completely clean". I brought it to the computer repair shop, and they copied a lot of important files onto those square disc thingies (floppies?). Well, I decided to just get a new computer instead. I ignored those discs until now, and I need some of the files from there. But I'm afraid of putting the files on my new computer, since it might have a virus.
What should I do?

[Alun]

Run a virus scan on the disks before copying any files over, to make sure.

(Though honestly, I'm a little skeptical about the existence of a virus that couldn't be eradicated "unless [the computer] was wiped completely clean" in the first place.  Who told you that?)

[BOYD1981]

do you know what virus it was? you could search your anti-virus software's database for it or search online to see if there's a "cure" for it, then as an added precaution backup any files you want to keep on to a cd, insert the disks they gave you and run a virus scan on them.
if there aren't that many floppy disks it's likely that the files backed up are only uninfected system files and not stuff like graphics or games.
to my knowledge there aren't any computer viruses that don't have a fix, it can take a couple of days but there is usually always a fix available for your chosen anti-virus software, and sometimes microsoft have fixes up on their site, it sounds to me like the repair shop you took the pc to don't know what they're doing.

[modgeulator]

it sounds to me like the repair shop you took the pc to don't know what they're doing.

it sounds to me like they wanted to sell a computer...

[scotch]

If there is a virus on the disks you're ok just putting them in to the computer (unless you reboot while they are in the drive and it contains a boot sector virus... if any of those still work), you should also be ok getting documents off there (unless they are say, MS Office files with macro viruses in).  The only way you can get a virus is to execute some code from them, so I wouldn't recommend running any programs that are there.  On the other hand if I really needed to I might risk it, after running them through a recently updated AVG (or another anti virus), I've never seen a virus that got past a virus scanner, as BOYD said, they're added to the virus databases pretty quickly.

[Grapefruitologist]

Nevermind.
Darn it! These aren't the right discs!
They're lost!