January 22nd, 2003, 11:26 AM
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An Ominous Coward
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A boot sector virus is a virus that launches itself when you try to boot from a floppy (though less common, it can happen from a CD too). Basically, the virus sits on an infected (usually) non-bootable disk. If you leave the disk in the drive and boot the computer, the virus on the floppies 'boot sector' launches. You'll likely still see the error about the disk being non-bootable, but, in reality, it was bootable because of the virus. It's just that all it did is launch the virus on your PC. This is why it's a bad idea to leave a floppy in the drive when you start the computer. Also, if you can boot from a CD (which most comps can these days), you can launch one from there as well - but this far less common. Here's some examples:
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/index_dbs.html
In my experience, putting Linux and Windoze on 1 drive, 2 partitions is easier. I did the 2 disk thing, and Windows fudged the whole thing up. Now niether Grub nor LILO can boot Windoze (although, since both boot records still exist, I can just go to BIOS and switch which disk boots first to determine which OS I launch).
Just put Windoze down first, let it eat the MBR on the disk, then, let Linux take control afterward by installing it on a different partition (all this is fairly easy to do from the Linux install if you're using Red Hat [anaconda installation tool] - can't speak for other distros except Mandrake, which made it just as easy,... but that was two years ago). One warning: I installed on two different disks because Windoze always wanted to eat ALL of the partitions whether I wanted it to or not (meaning it wanted to overwrite all data on all partitions on all disks in case I had a deviant operating system somewhere that Microsoft did not approve of). You may need Partition Magic to do the dual installation depending on how stupid Windoze acts.
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