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dogbone

macrumors 68020
Original poster
I hope this is the right forum. I was thinking about the dual booting of windows and mac and I see that windows is installed on it's own partition. I presume that means that any viruses that are picked up while using the web when booted into windows on mac, will be isolated to the infected partition and will not affect OSX, is this correct.

If it is then could this not be another reason to make boot camp available. That is, a primarily windows user who bought a mac because of boot camp will eventually come to a situation where windows becomes infected and things start to go wrong. It would then be tempting to just boot up into mac and continue and try to sort the problem out later. Would this not be the very best advertising for mac?

Just a thought.
 

dejo

Moderator emeritus
Sep 2, 2004
15,982
452
The Centennial State
dogbone said:
It can infect the mac partition? :eek: oh well there goes my 'theory'

It can infect the mac partition, but only if it can see it. Which, normally, wouldn't be the case. Mac partitions are HFS and Windows can't normally see HFS partitions. They would need a program like MacDrive installed.
 

EricNau

Moderator emeritus
Apr 27, 2005
10,728
281
San Francisco, CA
dejo said:
It can infect the mac partition, but only if it can see it. Which, normally, wouldn't be the case. Mac partitions are HFS and Windows can't normally see HFS partitions. They would need a program like MacDrive installed.
...or just a very clever cracker.

I suspect the first Mac viruses we will see will work through Windows to get to OS X.
 
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