ISBN: | 978-5-5118-4545-6 |
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Crazy Boot is a computer virus that infects the Microsoft Windows operating systems causing no physical damage nor direct loss of information; it would be known as a hoax to some. If the host computer is booted from an infected floppy disk, this virus makes it look as though all physical hard drives have been lost. Crazy Boot spreads through unprotected disks easily. It spreads only on diskettes, not by file distribution. The virus resides in memory, it infects the master boot records of all physical hard disks and infects the boot sectors of floppy disks. If Crazy Boot is in memory, any access to the boot record is rerouted to a copy of the original boot sector. When the virus infects a hard drive, it makes a copy of the partition table (an important part of the system area), writes the copy, and deletes the original partition table. To read the partition information, Crazy Boot must be active in memory. If users boot from a floppy disk not infected by this virus in order to avoid it, all physical hard drives are inaccessible by normal means.