Partition ?

Hello every one I was just wondering what it would take for a virus or worm that resides on a C: OS set up; to possibly jump over or into and infect your D: or E: or any other partition you may have set up on your system?
Would the user have to manually drag and drop or download the infected file into the other partitions? Or is the virus or worm able to just cross over the partitioning barrier? Is there even a barrier when you partition or is it just like in a hospital where the only seperation you might have from an infectious person is the "curtain? Any information concerning this would be very much appreciated to me and maybe others as well, who care about security issues. Mahalo ! Thanks !

 

Hello,
Your question is a bit vague.
Virus can destroy data on other partitions (D, E, F etc), but this needs to be coded into the virus to happen - for instance, a line of code that tells the virus to delete all docs on D, or replicate itself to some mundane folder on G and so on. However, no matter where the executable resides, when running, it will be connected to your system. But this is no different from any other program.
Imagine you install some program on D...
Theoretically and practically, one some malware gets onto your pc, it could infect, ruin or whatever any partition - this takes extra code lines, but with enough lines you can do virtually anything.
Mrk

 

Thanks Mrkvonic, I guess if the partitions were write protected it would offer a little bit of protection. I think I wanna ask if its possible for the virus or worm to actually embed itself into an actual cluster or bit or does it need actual files to attack or attach itself to?

 

Hello,
There's no black magic here.
It can "embed" itself anywhere, but the question is, what it will do there? To what purpose. Now, since Dos 5, I think, there's no longer physical access to hardware via os - that is, all writing to memory and disk is done via virtual addresses. You cannot tell the system to what specific location on the disk / memory to write. This is called the protected mode (in case of ram), but it also applies to all hardware. This prevents running out of buffer, overwriting data etc. So, virus will only be able to destroy the files the system sees - not the physical hard drive structure (we're talking Windows here, right?).
You really should not worry about this kind of questions.
Just remember - virus is another program, a piece of code. Nothing magical. Just make sure you have offline backups of things that are really important to you and are irreplaceable (data, photos, documents, work), plus nice to have things like program installers, urls, links etc. Keep them on cd / dvds, external hdd etc, and in the worst of the worst cases, you will have to reinstall your system - effectively killing any possible resident pest.
Mrk

 

Thanks man I guess this thread is done