How to protect your data from viruses

Has your computer ever gotten a virus that was so malicious, you had to completely erase your hard drive by reformatting it? And then you had to go through the arduous process of resinstalling your operating system and all of your programs? That was hard enough to deal with, but the real zinger of the whole ordeal was the fact that, if your computer was set up the way most are, you lost all of your data: all of your documents, all of your music, and most importantly to many, all of your email!

Well, there is a way to avoid losing your data to viruses (aside from having an Anti-Virus program installed, running, and up-to-date, of course). This is something that I do to all of the systems that I build. It is simply to partion the hard drive into at least two partitions. In other words, you have one hard drive, but you set it up in such a way that your computer reads it as two hard drives. So, instead of just having the C drive as your entire hard drive where everything is stored (your OS, progams, and data), and the D drive as your CD-ROM, you have the C drive as your first partition (section) of your hard drive that has your operating system and progams on it, and you have the D drive as your second partition, which has all of your data on it (see screenshot below).

(click to enlarge)

You can even set it up so that, if you use Outlook Express to send/receive your email, your email is stored on your D drive as well so you won’t lose your email to a virus!

The thing is, most large PC manufacturers set up their systems with just one partition. And if you want to be able to restore it with the restore CD’s that came with the computer, then you will need to keep it set up that way (this is why I prefer to build my own systems, among many other reasons). You can always reformat the hard drive and set it up the way you want to, but you will risk voiding the warranty if it is still valid.

Actually, some major manufacturers do have the hard drives on their systems set up with two paritions, however, this if for an entirely different reason. The first partition, again, contains everything, and the second partition is strictly for storing the restore files that put your computer back to the way it was when you first got it when you choose the restore option (it takes place of the restore CD’s; HP does this to some of their systems).

However, if you have a computer that was built by someone, or if your warranty is up, then you are free to use this type of setup. All you need to do this is the installation CD for either Windows XP or Windows 2000. Windows 98 users will have to use F-disk to do this.