[b1gapl]

My friend has an HD that when you connect it, it shows a blue screen and then the system reboots. He says it will just keep repeating this over and over. It's set on master and windows is installed on it. I told him he could try setting the drive to slave and see what happens. He said that he fears that the problem could be a virus and that if he set it as slave, the virus will be transmitted to the other drives. All he wants is to his files out...what should he do?

[plumber4578]

I would use the drive as a slave drive. If I feared of a virus that might mess up my master drive, I would just back up everything that I could on a DVDR or CDR and keep my fingers crossed that such wouldn't happen. I backup my files once a month on a DVDRW disc. I don't half a antivirus program. I figure on reformatting my drive once a year anyway. Makes your machine run 100 % better and gets rid of any glitches in the operating system that always works there way into windows.

[b1gapl]

OK I told my friend I'm going to take the risk and connect in my computer, since all my stuff is backed up already. If a virus does get in my master, I could just do a reformat and everything is fine?

[john3]

yes that will work. good luck.

[dragonknightjoe]

Yea, I hate these sort of issues. What I almost always do is burn backups of all my important stuff. But I am seriouly thinking about backing up off site. With this one place its a good price, and I hear they are really good. http://www.bytefortress.net. If they are as good as they say, I think I am going to phase out dvd backups for that service.

Sorry to hear about your friends HD issues though. I hope everything is working out with it.

[Apokalipse]

if you are worried about viruses, use Antivir. it's a great antivirus program.

anyway, setting a drive as slave is not something that would trigger a virus to spread.