Some nice folks have recently told me about broken links in the article. Thank you! The NTFS4DOS tool I specified is still available. Datapol is still alive, apparently having been acquired by Avira, the German company who makes the free — and very good, I might add — antivirus program, Antivir. Here’s the full orignal article with all of the links checked and fixed:

My latest Kool Tekkie Tool (KTT, pronounced “kit”) comprises a thumb drive made bootable with Datapol’s NTFS4DOS; the latest version (3.16b) of FRISK Software International’s F-Prot Antivirus for DOS is run from the command line. Both of these utilities are free for personal use, but require payment if you plan to use them in a commercial setting: NTFS4DOS is only $25; F-prot is $29 for a 20-user license.

NTFS4DOS is, in itself, a KTT. It allows you to make an NTFS-capable floppy disk or thumb drive and comes with chkdsk and defrag utilities to boot. First, make your drive bootable by following the instructions in my LockerGnome article, “Kool Tool to Make Your Thumb Drive Bootable.” CAUTION! This will completely erase your drive; be sure you have your data backed up before you start. Then, download NTFS4DOS and run the setup. From the NTFS4DOS program group, select “Create NTFS-capable boot floppy.” Select the drive letter of your thumb drive and click Next twice. Your thumb drive is now bootable and NTFS capable.

Next, download F-prot, the latest virus signatures and the latest macro virus signatures and extract them to a folder on your thumb drive. You’re ready to go! Plug it in and let’s take it for a spin.

Make sure you set your PC’s BIOS to boot from your thumb drive. On most machines, you do this by making “USB” or “Removable Device” first in the boot order. If all goes well, the PC will boot to a startup menu. Choose NTFS4DOS; you’ll see the drives being mounted and if you are using the freeware version, the screen will scroll to the NTFS4DOS title screen; you will have to answer “yes” to the question “Do you use this version of NTFS4DOS for private usage only? (Yes/No):” You’ll see the mounted drives at the top of the screen and the C:\> prompt at the bottom. Change to the folder where you stored F-prot and run f-prot.exe to do a virus scan.

Pretty Kool, eh?

Cheers!
The Geek

Have a computer problem? A question about your latest gadget? Click here to Ask the Geek! Kenny “The Geek” Harthun has been playing with geeky stuff since 1965. He’s a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with Connective Computing, Inc. providing network, desktop and info security support services to a wide range of clients.