Virus n boot Sector

[mnajem]

Just wanna ask. My friend use to find her computer can' t work...the statement from her was boot sector virus...what this all mean?

[G.Ben.M]

A bootsector virus is a computer virus which infects the hard driv'es master boot sector (mbr) which in turn may render it unable to boot therefore useless.

Many AV programs scan for bootsector viruses, including AVG Antivirus, which is what I use.

[darkes]

How does she know she has a boot sector virus?
To recover from this you need a stand alone anti virus recovery disk, which you can boot from.
Or alternatively boot from a clean floppy/CD, and run the antivirus software.
The boot sector is the first thing that your PC reads from the hard disk when you boot up, and if it is corrupt then your PC will either fail to boot, or if the boot sector is infected, the PC will seem to boot correctly, but the virus will re-infect your system.
You can stop this happening by having a decent antivirus scanner running, and as a another line of defense most PCs will allow you to set an option in the BIOS to issue a warning message if something is trying to overwrite the mbr (boot sector).

[Mallam]

hey mnajem , this should help you out!!
Boot Sector Infector
A BSI is a virus that attacks the computer on boot. Sometimes
halting the boot procedure alltogether and/or damaging boot files
making the system either unstable and crash on startup or not
able to start at all. These are some of the worst viruses to
get because once infected you are unable to run system virus scans thru the OS

Bingo!!