Hardware Question - Plz, It's Important To Me That I Get Answers

[slimball2001]

Um, yeah. I have an old windows xp that doesn't work anymore, and I want to throw it's floppy drive into my vista's empty 3" bay.

I know for sure that my xp had a virus and it absolutely fried the motherboard and cpu, so I was wondering if the virus could be transmitted through floppy drive when I put it in my vista.

Cause I really don't want my $1500 vista to get messed up.

So basicly, I'm asking if I put the floppy drive in my vista, will it mess it up? (I wouldn't be worrying about this if I had bought the $100 recovery disk when I got my computer. (When i bought my computer it came with vista pre-installed, and I didn't want to pay an extra $100 for a disk, especially when I could buy at least 4 games for that)).

[JSKY]

Make sure that there is no floppy disk in the drive when you power up your PC.

When your computer is infected with a virus and your data is corrupted, is the hardware at risk?

A computer virus is a term applied to any program that is designed to damage data stored on a computer system or network. The virus may infect documents, applications or worst of all, system files that are essential to the correct running of the computer system.

A virus itself is programme software and has effect basically on software and not hardware. It could have effect on the systems or Application software to execute specific instructions on the hardware.

People argue that the Virus can affect hardware, because some viruses when they infect the computer can shut down, restart, even open the CD ROM tray or manipulate other peripherals like the Keyboard! Of course they do, but technically they do not operate on them as you would want to think they do, they instruct the software or drivers on how to perform.

Viruses can instruct software to overrun the processor or memory thus burning out the motherboard. Or even telling the system fan to turn off overheating the CPU/motherboard. Yes it kills the hardware, but it is still software telling software or drivers what to do.

The only real hardware I know of that can be altered by a virus is the BIOS. But then, the BIOS is still a set of programme instructions telling the computer how to run. Change the instruction and you change the way it acts.

With hardware. If you have no drivers or a program telling it how to work. It is a useless piece of equipment just taking up space.

If your still worried tho. Set your BIOS not to seek or boot from the Floppy drive and then do a virus scan.

[shanenin]

A virus can't be transmitted along with an empty floppy drive. To carry an infection, you would need to have an infected floppy in it.

[slimball2001]

Thanks for the help, I'm a programmer, but I don't know much about installing new hardware other than a graphics card or a new fan or cd drive.

Thanks,

Prof. Zilban