As, we know all disks and hard drives are divided into small sectors and the first sector which is found on disks or drives are called the boot sector and contains the Master Boot Record. The Master Boot Record helps in maintaining the information of location of partitions on the drive and reading of the bootable operating system partition.

The boot sector is a region of a hard disk, floppy disk, and other similar data storage device. It is loaded to memory and executed as a part of the bootstrap sequence. The boot sector contains a small computer program that is loaded on the operating system into memory and transfers the control.

The viruses can infect the Boot sector. This virus that affects the code of boot sector or the Master Boot Record of a system is called as Boot sector viruses. The Master Boot Record is a small program that runs when the computer starts up. It can control Master Boot Record which resides on the first sector of the hard disk.

The best protection which can be provided against boot sector viruses is a good antivirus program with up-to-date virus definitions. These antivirus programs can scan and remove viruses in files on disks and monitor the operation of the computer and look for specific viruses.

The other method to preventing Boot Sector viruses is avoid the use of the infected floppies which results from shared diskettes. The other easy ways to avoid boot sector viruses by avoiding keeping leave floppy disks in the drive which can infect the boot sector virus. In most of the systems users to change the boot sequence so that the system always attempts to boot first from the local hard drive CD ROM drive.

The Master Boot Record executes every time a computer is started, a boot sector virus is extremely dangerous. Once the boot code on the drive is infected, the virus will be loaded into memory on every startup. The boot virus can spread to every disk that the system reads. Boot sector viruses are difficult to remove, as most antivirus programs cannot clean the Master Boot Record as Windows is running. The other bootable antivirus such as a Norton antivirus can rescue set to properly remove a boot sector virus.

The common boot sector viruses include Monkey, NYB, stoned, and form. The most dangerous symptoms of these viruses on system are this virus can cause a variety of boot. In some cases, the stored data disappear from entire partitions. The most dangerous symptom is that the computer suddenly becomes unstable. The general problem of this type of infection is computer failure to start up or to find the hard drive. The error messages such as invalid system disk may be used.

Boot sector viruses are usually spread by infected floppy disks. In the past, these were usually bootable disks, but this is no longer the case. A floppy disk does not need to be bootable to transmit a boot virus. Any disk can cause infection if it is in the drive when the computer boots up or shuts down. These viruses can make the way through the networks from file downloads and can affect through email file attachments. The other method to get rid of viral infection is to use a back up files, so that we can restore them if a virus damages them. Keep the original application and system disks write-protected. This will prevent the virus from spreading to your original disks. Make a habit of locking application floppy disk before inserting into floppy drive.

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