Dual boot - one clean OS, one virus-ridden

Uncle Oswald

Hi

I was thinking that it would be a clever idea to set up a dual boot system: one partition for eBay, mail, online banking and so on and another for "uncharted territory".

I have gotten virus and spyware infections a couple of times... even once from something as innocent as looking for song lyrics. So I would like a completely clean environment for safe surfing and one where it doesn't matter because I would never be accessing anything of a personal nature from there.

My thinking is that all the bad stuff resides in the registry of the infected operating system and is not aware of the other clean OS right next door and so cannot cross-contaminate it.

Anyone else have a similar setup or see any potential pitfalls?

Thanks,
Oswald

c-note

YUP
its a good idea, i've done it myself with 2x windows xp

it worked pretty well
with the clean install, your registry, windows files etc should remain pretty clean.

however
if someone was bothered to write a virus for a dual boot pc then you'd still be at risk... one operating system can still access the volume for the second! you can make the usual folders private (as with multiple users on one install of xp), but its not as totally safe as it may seem

you can manually hide the partition for OS2 when you boot OS1 (by not assigning a drive letter for the partiton for OS2)
This is a good idea as it means users and programs cannot access that partition unless the assign it a drive letter first!

and you can even edit the MASTER BOOT RECORD so that when you start the computer it will boot automatically into OS1 without the option of selecting OS2. So that a random person starting your computer would have no indication that its a dual boot machine!

then if you did have a problem, simply re-edit the MBR, boot to OS2 and recover whatever system files you need to.

marco_polo

Uncle Oswald wrote: »

Hi

I was thinking that it would be a clever idea to set up a dual boot system: one partition for eBay, mail, online banking and so on and another for "uncharted territory".

I have gotten virus and spyware infections a couple of times... even once from something as innocent as looking for song lyrics. So I would like a completely clean environment for safe surfing and one where it doesn't matter because I would never be accessing anything of a personal nature from there.

My thinking is that all the bad stuff resides in the registry of the infected operating system and is not aware of the other clean OS right next door and so cannot cross-contaminate it.

Anyone else have a similar setup or see any potential pitfalls?

Thanks,
Oswald

Make it a Linux partition and you are laughing, security wise. Ubuntu is very easy to setup nowadays.

Still vunerable to boot sector viruses and stuff like that damaging the disk etc (coming from from the other OS) but your data would be much safer. I think it is certainly theoreticaly possible for a windows virus to get at an ext2/3 linux partition when is running windows but most unlikely.

Uncle Oswald

Thank you c-note and Marco Polo

I'm going to check into your recommendations.

I don't know much about Linux - sorry, but I like the idea of not assigning a drive letter to the second partition. That should work out nicely.

bushy...

Download this :

http://www.rpath.org/downloadImage?fileId=5779


then download this

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

to "play " it .

if you're not familiar with it , its almost a completely separate pc inside your pc sort of thing

marco_polo

Thinking about this further, you actually would have to go out of your way to install the ext3 drivers on windows so if you never do this then the data on the linux cannot easily be compromised (excepting naughty behaviour like deleting the partition of course, but nobody will be getting your bank details or root password )

bushy...

I can't see this happening too easily , but a clever virus writer could have his little pet download something like this : http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs , then get it to trawl through ext2/3 partitions for interesting things ?

Or he may gain remote access to your pc and silently download it and run it ?

Blowfish

bushy... wrote: »

I can't see this happening too easily , but a clever virus writer could have his little pet download something like this : http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs , then get it to trawl through ext2/3 partitions for interesting things ?

Or he may gain remote access to your pc and silently download it and run it ?

Simple solution.