Virus issue relating to dual booting XP and Vista Beta 2

[Guest]

I am currently planning on installing windows XP and Windows Vista on two
separate primary partitions or logical drives in a dual boot setup. The data
will be stored on another partition. I'm wondering if I encountered a virus
corruption problem or virus attack while working with Windows Vista Beta 2;
would my entire hard drive or disk be infected with this virus? In other
words, if my Vista partition was infected with a virus, would this mean that
my XP partition and data partition would be infected as well or would I still
be able to boot into XP and access my data as before? The reason I'm asking
this is because many established antivirus vendors apart from Trend Micro
will probably not provide beta support for this test software.

Would it be advisable to install Vista Beta 2 on a separate internal hard
disk instead of installing it in a dual boot setup on the same disk? Are
there any advantages of installing Vista 2 on a separate hard disk? If I
elected to do this, will I need to change the setup BIOS setting to boot
first from the specified hard disk everytime I need to switch from XP and
Vista. In other words, I won't be presented with the convenient boot up
choice menu if I decided to install both OSs on two separate HDs.

At the moment of trying to decide on whether to buy a stylish compact space
saving PC with one internal hard disk or a large tower PC with two internal
hard disks for the purpose of installing vista beta 2 with the preinstalled
OEM XP on each system. I would appreciate if anybody out there could clarify
my query on this virus issue mentioned earlier.

Thanks,

Martin

 

[Robert Moir]

I am currently planning on installing windows XP and Windows Vista on
two separate primary partitions or logical drives in a dual boot
setup. The data will be stored on another partition. I'm wondering
if I encountered a virus corruption problem or virus attack while
working with Windows Vista Beta 2; would my entire hard drive or disk
be infected with this virus? In other words, if my Vista partition
was infected with a virus, would this mean that my XP partition and
data partition would be infected as well or would I still be able to
boot into XP and access my data as before? The reason I'm asking
this is because many established antivirus vendors apart from Trend
Micro will probably not provide beta support for this test software.

It's entirely possible that a virus on one partition or disk can infect
files on another.

Would it be advisable to install Vista Beta 2 on a separate internal
hard disk instead of installing it in a dual boot setup on the same
disk?

I would personally go a step further, I would look at putting the hard
disks into a removable caddy system so that only one disk at a time will
be on your computer. That way you'll be certain that you're testing Vista
properly, that you're using XP "properly" and that no problems can be
caused by the beta software, and most importantly judging from your post,
there is no chance of a security issue on one disk causing a problem with
files on the other.

--
--
Rob Moir, Microsoft MVP for Security
Blog Site - http://www.robertmoir.com
Virtual PC 2004 FAQ -
http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/VirtualPC2004FAQ.html
I'm always surprised at "professionals" who STILL have to be asked:
"Have you checked (event viewer / syslog)".

 

[Guest]

Another good reason, Vista 'does things' to NTFS partitions that make them
incompatible with existing disk-maintenance tools. I'm not sure yet if this
applies only to the Vista system-partition, or if it alters any others it
writes data to - but I'd hate to find I can't backup my XP partition as a
result!

I see this as being a major bugbear with Vista - most of the exising
engineer's tools ain't gonna work with it. Not only that, because of the
obstructive permissions on Vista NTFS, which even bar Admins from folders in
their OWN profiles, trivial repair-tasks which are straightforward on XP are
going to be very hard to accomplish. If even you, the owner, can't access a
damaged file such as an oversize mailbox , what repair-action can you take?
Buy new computer? Well, maybe... :-/

 

[Robert Moir]

Another good reason, Vista 'does things' to NTFS partitions that make
them incompatible with existing disk-maintenance tools. I'm not sure
yet if this applies only to the Vista system-partition, or if it
alters any others it writes data to - but I'd hate to find I can't
backup my XP partition as a result!

I see this as being a major bugbear with Vista - most of the exising
engineer's tools ain't gonna work with it. Not only that, because of
the obstructive permissions on Vista NTFS, which even bar Admins from
folders in their OWN profiles, trivial repair-tasks which are
straightforward on XP are going to be very hard to accomplish. If
even you, the owner, can't access a damaged file such as an oversize
mailbox , what repair-action can you take? Buy new computer? Well,
maybe... :-/

This is a good reason not to dual boot, but I don't see it as a problem
with Vista. Computers upgrade, operating systems upgrade, file systems
upgrade.

And utilities upgrade with them. The tools we all used on NT 3.51 and NT4
either upgraded or died when Windows 2000 came out, and again when XP came
out.

 

[Guest]

..And utilities upgrade with them. The tools we all used on NT 3.51 and NT4
either upgraded or died when Windows 2000 came out, and again when XP
came out.

The only instance of this I can recall is that disk-utilities for Windows
2000 wouldn't initially work on XP's NTFS structure, but the vendors soon
sorted this out. And in any case we had the option of using FAT32 until we'd
gained some experience with NTFS5. Apart from that I still regularly use
utilities I bought or dowloaded in NT 4 days, on XP or Server 2003. They
mostly still work just as they did.

With Vista, the situation is rather different in that there will be no
workaround -it cannot be installed onto any other filesystem but its own.
Furthermore, I'm not aware of any approved way of maintaining the system. -
Exactly how is maintenance supposed to be carried-out if you cannot access
damaged files, even as a superuser? This scenario has never been encountered
before on Windows (and probably hasn't been on ANY computer OS) so I don't
know the answer.. Question is, has anyone at Redmond thought this through?

 

[Guest]

Many thanks for answering my query above. From your helpful response, I take
it that it is possible that a virus on one partition can infect files on
another partition. And from your last comment, I interpret that there is no
risk of a security issue on one disk compromising or jeopardising the
security of another hard disk. Where can I purchase a removable caddy system
or external bay for putting my hard disks into? Is this device connected to
the PC via USB and will I notice a slow down using this device? I have also
considered using Virtual PC 2004 in order to switch between XP and Vista.
However, according to Microsoft, virtualisation for Vista will only be
supported using Virtual PC 2007 (new version). Is this true? I see from
this http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/vista/virtualpc2004.htm article
that it is not possible to capture an ISO image that exceeds 2.2 GB with
Virtual PC 2004. This would be a problem if I was trying to capture the
Windows Vista Beta 2 ISO image saved on my hard drive as it is over 3GB in
size. Any workaround or is Virtual PC 2004 not suitable for running Vista as
a virtal guest machine on a XP host.

I would welcome one last reply to this matter.

Thanks,

Martin