Re: Virus Infection question
Quote:
Originally posted here by g3neration
I was curious as to if a boot CD could be infected with a virus?
This is my situation. Lets say that I have a computer that I believe could be infected with at least 2 different viruses/malware/etc. Now, I wish to create a custom boot cd or something along those lines. I create an ISO and burn it to CD. Would that ISO be infected?
In general, you would be safe from infecting a CD if it is only a write-once read-many CD (this is, of course, so long as the files you are writing are not themselves infected).
However, it would be very possible (and I have several examples from my own research) for a computer virus to infect a CD-RW disk once it has been formatted and made ready to use in your system as a secondary removable drive (like a floppy drive or ZIP Drive). This is because ytou are formatting the disk to allow "Drag and Drop" capabilities to the CD so that you can use it for storage without having to re-write every time you decide to add more files. If you format your Boot CD as simply a Bootable CD by using a CD-R rather than a CD-RW, in 99.99% of the cases you should be ok... again so long as none of the files you are burning to the CD-R are already infected.
Quote:
Originally posted here by Locked
[B
but to be sure:
boot to safe mode
ensure that the hash of the iso you're burning(i'm assuming its an iso) matches the hash from the web. Then burn the CD. Then scan the cd on a different computer.
I hope this is all correct, and I hope it helps you! [/B]
as noted above by locked, this is a very good suggestion to make use of. I prefer to always burn a CD either while in limited account status and after doing a Safe Mode scan for infected or damaged files. After buring the CD I always recheck in safe mode to rescan the CD for any possible infections or damages that may have occurred.