Hiya Rick,
And thus Rick let it be known to John:
  jk>> But wouldn't the virus be able to infect your PC if you read or
  jk>> write on the disk.
  RC> You must be as dumb as dirt.
  RC> How many times and how many ways do you have to be told that
  RC> "reading" a disk and "writing" to a disk will _not_ cause an
  RC> infection?  How many times will you have to be told that, to get
  RC> infected, you have to _execute_ the software that causes the
  RC> infection?
  RC> Not reading an infected disk.  Not writing to a disk with an infected
  RC> boot sector.
Isn't infection an invasion of an unwanted foriegn body?.. let me just check 
the dictionary here.  ok, contamination of.  Now that being the case by 
reading in a file to memory or writing out to a disk you can in this way 
infect a machine.  The symptoms of viral infection is seen when the virus is 
executed.
Take the body analogy:
We all breath, we have to.  A PC has to have a diskdrive.  When we breath we 
can breath in virii, thus becoming infected.  A PC requires software you get 
software from a disk, during the read/write it picks up a virus, it is now 
infected.
The body does not feel the symptoms of infection until the virus is able to 
be triggered, either low immune system etc.  So now the body, that could have 
been infected a week ago is now feeling the symptoms of that virus attack.
To trigger a virus it has to be executed, until then it remains infected but 
doesn't show any symptoms.
Cya,
Pete
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