Boot sector virus

Updated: 08/02/2020 by Computer Hope
Computer Virus

Computer virus that infects the first or first few sectors of a computer hard drive or diskette drive allowing the virus to activate as the drive or diskette boots.

Tip

To help protect the boot sector from becoming infected with a boot sector virus, many BIOS manufacturers have protection that is enabled or disabled through the BIOS setup. This feature must be disabled when installing an operating system, like Microsoft Windows, that needs to write to the boot sector during the install.

Boot sector, MBR, Security terms, Virus