Virus theory?

[ahhaa]

Theoretically... 8)

1. if you have a computer with an active and current Internet Security Suite,
2. and you hook up a virus'd hard drive to it,
3. and the HD has an OS on it (say XPsp2), but the jumper is set to slave;

and right at startup you run a full system scan-

are you endangering the host machine?
can every virus be removed, so you know the HD is clean?

[Dv8ted2]

The antivirus software would fight off the infection. The hard drive would be treated as just another drive.

[jagabo]

Theoretically...can every virus be removed, so you know the HD is clean?

No.

[Dv8ted2]

Theoretically...can every virus be removed, so you know the HD is clean?

No.

Yes, they can. Most often though, it is quicker to delete the partition, format and reinstall.

[Super Warrior]

Unless he has data to be safely retrieved from the HDD, so a full reformat is not an option.

[jagabo]

Theoretically...can every virus be removed, so you know the HD is clean?

No.

Yes, they can.

Not if the virus is a new one that the AV software cannot detect. As a practical matter this would be unlikely. But it's certainly possible.

[oldandinthe way]

Not all viruses can be removed.
Not all viruses can be removed without data loss.

How do you know this drive is infected? Why haven't you cleaned it without placing a system at risk?

Get your hands on a bootable antivirus disk and use it to clean this drive as the only hard disk in the system.

Anything else you do is higher risk, and unnecessary risk.

[Dv8ted2]

Not all viruses can be removed.
Not all viruses can be removed without data loss.

Yes, they can. I remove viruses and trojans from work computers all the time. The only element involved is time.

If you do backups, you can even minimize data loss.

My end users are always infecting their machines and I am always cleaning them up.

[oldandinthe way]

You users and you are very lucky. There are viruses which do sufficient damage that only recovery from a backup will get the system operating again. And data recovery is not virus removal.

[Dv8ted2]

And data recovery is not virus removal.

Yes, I know...