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Can Boot Camp get a virus and ruin Mac OS X?

iEugene

iEugene

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 18, 2006
137
0
AZ
My friend is thinking about buying a Mac, but he is going to install Boot Camp for sure, but he asked a fairly intresting question.

"If I were to install Boot Camp on my Mac and while in Windows I get a virus, how will that effect the Mac? Will Mac OS X be affected by it?"

I never thought of this, perhaps someone could help?
 
iEugene said:
My friend is thinking about buying a Mac, but he is going to install Boot Camp for sure, but he asked a fairly intresting question.

"If I were to install Boot Camp on my Mac and while in Windows I get a virus, how will that effect the Mac? Will Mac OS X be affected by it?"

I never thought of this, perhaps someone could help?
Click to expand...


No. A windows virus will not affect OSX. As long as you format it as NTFS, your good.
 
imacintel said:
No. A windows virus will not affect OSX. As long as you format it as NTFS, your good.
Click to expand...
Wow that was fast, thanks a bunch!
 
Yes, this is a very busy forum. In excess of 2000 posts a day...People respond very quickly, get used to it.(not in a negitive way:p)
 
If its a virus that kills your harddrive, it would take your whole drive down, even the OS X part... however that would be one strong virus(i'm not even sure how many there are like that for XP)
 
imacintel said:
Yes, this is a very busy forum. In excess of 2000 posts a day...People respond very quickly, get used to it.(not in a negitive way:p)
Click to expand...
Yes I'm part of another forum that has speedy responses as well, I just wasn't sure if this subforum had a lot of activity.
 
zap2 said:
If its a virus that kills your harddrive, it would take your whole drive down, even the OS X part... however that would be one strong virus(i'm not even sure how many there are like that for XP)
Click to expand...

Yeah, the only things I can think of are viruses that either try to overwrite the hard disk boot record or partition table and/or format the disk in its entirety....
 
NTFS can only be read to and Cannot access Mac OSX. However, you have read/write in FAT32, allowing thing to destroy MacOSX.
 
In theory "yes" but in real life "unlikely"

iEugene said:
"If I were to install Boot Camp on my Mac and while in Windows I get a virus, how will that effect the Mac? Will Mac OS X be affected by it?"
Click to expand...

In theory yes. It would be easy to write a Windows progroam that simply overwrites the disk drive with zeros even to non-windows disk patitions. One example of a Windows program that can destroy the data on the Mac partitions is "fdisk" which is the program used to create disk partitions.

But it real life PC viruses only mess with PC files. From the virus author's point of view the chance of his virus landing on a dual booted mac is near zero so why would he even concider it.

Anyone who can gain admin access under either Windows or Mac OS, or Linux or... ca do as he pleases with the hardware.
 
imacintel said:
NTFS can only be read to and Cannot access Mac OSX. However, you have read/write in FAT32, allowing thing to destroy MacOSX.
Click to expand...
You got it kinda backwards. NTFS can be read (and only read) BY OS X. But, it's Windows that has the viruses, not OS X. That is, if he were to format his Windows partition with FAT32 then OS X viruses (vritually nonexistent) would be able to modify the Windows partition. OS X can too be installed on FAT32 but it is uncommon. If OS X were to be installed so then the partition can be accessed by Windows (Windows cannot interact with HFS paritions without special third-party software). And so, because viruses are only a threat when running Windows, it doesn't matter whether you use NTFS or FAT32 for your Windows partition from a Windows viruses security point of view.
 
Virtual PC

Hi, i know its not boot camp, but if running windows in Virtual PC, can a windows virus affect OSX?

thanks
 
i formatted mine as fat because to my understanding that means i can now access files from the winodws side with my mac which i couldnt have done in ntfs correct?
 
Hey Guys,

Can someone please answer the above question? I know it's been a while since this thread was active but can still be made alive :)

I have just bought an iMac 24" and have performed the Boot Camp procedure. I formatted the Windows portion to FAT32 because to my understanding I gain more access to the Windows files through OS-X better then NTSF format? When using Windows, is it still going to be prone to catching viruses??

Cheers in advance,

Caleb
 
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