Re: Scanning from a CD

On Sun, 1 Apr 2007 19:36:48 +0100, "Bill Ridgeway"

You wrote -
<<If you drop the HD in your PC, there are two risks:
- your PC may corrupt an at-risk HD (Autochk, SR/SVI, etc.)
- a surface exploit could infect your PC>>

Any action has its attendant risks. The trick is to keep to reduce the risk
and hope you don't get caught.

Of course. It's not often you get a chance to avoid risk; when you
do, then go for it... it's often a matter of simply re-ordering the
same things in a way that ensures safety is assured at each step.

Could you please explain how my PC may corrupt another HD (which is
installed as a secondary master)?

If the HD is failing, then accessing it may make it worse, and writing
to it may definitely make it worse. Not all HD failure patterns are
of the "progressive surface fade" type; sometimes it is the HD's RAM
or circuitry that glitches every now and then.

When a new HD is discovered by Windows Me or XP in particular, the OS
will write to the disk's visible file systems. System Restore will
default to On, and SR data will be written to disk. There are other
mechanisms that may write to disk as well, bur SR is enough.

More to the point, a HD from an unstable system being fixed, may have
suffered a bad exit that leaves to volume flagged as "dirty". If so,
Windows will "fix" the file system on startup - and in the case of XP,
this will not stop and ask permission before writing changes.

If your OS is not safe > 137G and you drop in a hard drive that is
over that capacity, any of the above (especially "fixing the file
system") can trash the contents.

Similarly, if my computer threat prevention is bank up-to-date, how can my
computer be infected - other than the ever present risk from the time lapse
between the risk being released to the wild and the update being installed)?

The hard drive you drop in to scan may exploit internal surfaces of
your OS. Every code surface can have exploits, and Windows tends to
"grope" material even when you take pains not to "open" anything.

Think anything that handles content; defrag/.PF, indexing,
thumbnailers, the antivirus itself, System Restore etc. as well as the
code that runs if you list folders; icon extraction, top of the list.

If your OS is read-only, there's no risk. It's not often you get a
chance to avoid risk; when you do, then go for it...

As to "threat prevention" being "up to date": The reason I use 11
scanners from Bart is that I have seen malware ITW that each one of
these scanners has been the only one to detect. So I would certainly
not rely on a single resident av to protect the host OS.



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