I whole heartedly disagree that partition tables, boot sectors and
such are sufficiently different on the mac that a windows virus can't
affect them.
I don't care what os you've got on a drive, if you trash the
partition table, boot sector (the boot loader *must* jump to code
somewhere on the disk) then you most certainly can trash the os and
render it inoperable.
The semi-advantage to this though is that if all that's missing is
the partition table, as long as you know how your partitions were
setup, you can easily enough reconstruct them using a partition
manager, whether it be fdisk or some other disk tool. I've done this
a number of times to repair old dos disks and some linux ones when
drives started going bad and lost their part tables for one reason or
another.
Of course, this assumes the user *knows* how their disk is split.
Most folks haven't a clue.
But, that's in the fix, not the actual damage. Any os can trash
another's boot code if it has physical access to it as is the case in
a dual-boot scenario.
On Apr 8, 2006, at 1:08 PM, Access Curmudgeon wrote:
Actually, I have to take exception to your statement that XP can't
even see the Mac partitions,
Have you tried Boot Camp. I have not, I don't have an Intel Mac, so I
am just parroting from published reports. Your larger point is
absolutely correct, in that Windows PCs connected to Macintosh volumes
over a network can see the data if they are set up correctly, and some
of the dual boot hacks preceding Boot Camp didn't have this
limitation. Moreover, the shipping version of Boot Camp in Leopard
may not have this constraint.
and therefore viruses running on XP can't affect the OS X partitions.
Perhaps I should have been more clear. There is no evidence that
malware on a Windows PC or network can infect files on OS X volumes.
This vector of attack has long been available and OS X has exhibited
no vulnerability to it. Therefore, it is spurious to argue that Boot
Camp changes this equation significantly. A virus could delete any
file of course, if that is what its payload was designed to do, but
for this to effect a Mac user, the Mac user would first have had to
extend permissions to a Windows person or system. If your trusted
colleague starts maliciously erasing files on a shared drive, that is
not a weakness in OS X.
It's easy enough to trash the master boot record, partition tables,
and boot sectors of hds regardless of os installed.
These PC concepts do are not sufficiently equivalent on a Mac
formatted volume to expect that a PC virus could do this kind of
low-level damage.
Yes I responded to Abdul's troll. I still presume that the flamebait
was out of ignorance and therefore worthy of education. I am
disciplined not to respond immediately, but not enough not to respond
at all. On other boards I can count on someone else to handle the
requisite flaming...
