Can Windows viruses fill up my Mac's HD and affect the OS X environment?

[amin]

I plan to install Windows XP to one internal HD in my Mac Pro. I remember, years ago, having a Windows virus that filled up my hard drive with junk and even corrupted the restore partition (on a Windows machine, not a Mac). Using Boot Camp, can I isolate what Windows "sees" to that one HD so my OS X environment will be safe? Not to big a deal anyway, since I now know how to practice "safe Windows behavior," but I'd like to know. This has probably been answered, but after a brief search I have not found the answer.

 

[yippy]

Windows viruses won't be able to fill up the Mac OS X partition because Windows is incapable of writing to that file system. The only thing the could do is mess up the partition scheme which would take out everything, but a virus that bad is very, very rare.

 

[amin]

Thank you, that is good to know. Windows will never reside within the same HD as OS X on my system, so hopefully that will provide an additional layer of protection. No partitions to mess up.

 

[plinden]

These days, viruses tend not to be overtly damaging. There's more money to be made by installing backdoors so someone can zombify the PC, turning it into a spambot or DDoS attacker. That does affect the performance, but unless it's a really badly written virus, it probably wouldn't even fatally affect your XP install.

But install AVG free anyway. You don't need it running all the time. If you keep away from pron sites you can get away with weekly scans.