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Can a virus spread from one drive to a new one?

If I have a hard drive that I know has a virus on it with no antivirus (or the OS has been corrupted to the point that the antivirus is inaccessible), and then installed another hard drive that has an antivirus, could I use the second drive to purge the first one and save whatever files were on it? This is just for the sake of knowing what to do if this happens to me in the future, but any light that could be shed on the matter would be much appreciated.

1 Answer

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  • Anonymous
    8 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    If you connect an infected drive to a machine you should immediately right click it and select the option to scan it with your current anti-virus. That should remove any infections. Until you have done that you should not try to read the drive or it could infect the original drive. But to fit a new boot drive to a machine will not normally work unless you do a clean install onto that drive in that machine. A drive from another machine ften will not work, as it loads incorrect drivers for the original machine.

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