I have a Windows XP Pro dual booting with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope on a single hard drive.
On Windows XP I have a Eset NOD 32 while on Ubuntu I have no antivirus installed.
While working on the internet via Ubuntu, if a virus gets into my PC, it might probably not do much damage to Ubuntu as most of these virus' are designed for windows however I'm still worried that they may continue to reside on my Ubuntu partition…
- and since I am working in dual boot
mode ( not sharing any partitions at
the moment) will the virus affect the
windows partition? - Alternatively since I am using a
thumb drive to transfer data between
Ubuntu and Win XP the virus might
propogate through the flash drive?
Can I stop the virus from entering the system via Ubuntu and how?
Best Answer
It's certainly possible to infect Windows through Ubuntu. It can happen if you have an infected file that gets transferred from one OS to the other; however, an infected file that lives only on the Linux partition will probably not have any affect on the Windows OS.
The easiest way to keep Windows clean is to use an antivirus application in Windows. It might be a bit overkill to also install an antivirus app in Ubuntu as well; however, if you want, you could use something like ClamAV to scan files before transferring them to Windows. There's more info on ClamAV in this question on SuperUser.
The good thing about ClamAV is that it's an on-demand scanner, so it doesn't consume any resources when you don't need it. That way, when you transfer files from Ubuntu to Windows, all you need to do is scan them before copying them over to the other OS.