The urban-legend of "viruses in hard disk residue" is an old and familiar one.

And who knows, it might be (or might have been) an issue in the grand old days of Windows, when everybody's grandmother was routinely running all-powerful "Administrator" accounts and the Windows environment itself was a whole lot simpler.

Today, and certainly in Linux, it's an urban legend.

I have no doubt that the purveyors of "anti-virus" (sic...) software have fanned the flames of legends like these at every opportunity, because anything that makes their worthless wares seem appealing, is "a good thing" to them. But the fact is, a computer is just a machine. It is not powerful enough to be "infected by a virus," however intuitively appealing that human-notion might be to us.

Not to completely derail the thread, but would you mind explaining this in a bit more detail? It's no more urban legend to have malicious software in slack space (granted, it would require some additional bootstrapping, perhaps exploiting a bug in a filesystem driver) than the turkey virus (IIRC, this is the virus which overloaded monitor scanlines and burned out the hardware... I could be mistaken on the name). Unless I'm missing something?

The OP and response posts were pruned from the http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...drive.-745931/ thread to allow uncluttered OT-ing.