Virus spread to media hard drives?

[AndroidVageta]

Basically, want to upgrade to Windows 7 from my Vista install...mainly just to upgrade and the fact that over the year viruses slowly creaped on my system. Takes way too long to do a virus scan (were talking 4.5 terabytes of data here) so I'm just going to reinstall.

Question is, do viruses on my OS drive spread to my media drives (just music/movies/pics, etc.)?

If they do, do they affect the media? I ask because one of my hard drives Ive had through a couple of OS installs where the previous OS had viruses but none of the media has been corrupted and all still works flawlessly.

I just dont want to install Windows 7 and have it already be infected! Thanks guys!

 

[JesseKnows]

I must be missing something. If there could be viruses on the media, then an upgrade would not get rid of them. If there wouldn't be viruses on the media, then running a virus scan should not need to look at 4.5 TB of data.

To your questions, there were/are viruses that live in WMV or JPG data and exploit vulnerabilities in renderers/players. If your executables are up-to-date the viruses would just stay there and not cause harm.

 

[RebateMonger]

System malware is much harder to detect and remove than infected data files. And malware in data files doesn't do anything unless you use the files.

You should be able to safely reformat (or replace) the system disk, do a fresh install of Win7, install AntiVirus software, and then re-attach the data disks and scan them for any embedded malware.