Can a hard drive enclosure be infected?

dhruv990 · Feb 12, 2014

Hi, i know it's a stupid question but that virus got me scared senseless. I had given an old laptop for repair and when i got it back i used the recovery feature to reinstall windows. Now i'm somewhat sure that it wasn't used after i reinstalled windows but i could be wrong (i can't check because it's been 3 years since this happened). I took the hdd of the laptop out put it in the enclosure and connected it to another pc of mine. And just like that my entire computer was infected. The virus injected itself into each and every single exe file on the computer, it also disabled safe mode, the antivirus and prevented any other antivirus from being installed. Now did this virus come from the enclosure or did someone mess with the computer and infected it before i took the hdd out? Also what are the chances that the virus got onto the mainboard of the enclosure? It's a generic enclosure with no memory feature as far as i know.
Thanks for any help getting my common sense back

smorizio · Feb 12, 2014

most likely the test guys disks or cd were infected. as a tech the first mistake tech used to make and still do is use floppy disk or usb sticks and forget to break the write tab off on them so nothing can be written to burn in and test disks. you did not have a virus you had a trojan and a mbr virus. the trojan was on the mbr of the drive...with vendor restore disk that part does not get change on running a restore. most older restore used norton ghost or a cheap clone that used to do file replacment. some of the real bad virus like the monkey bar virus become the drive partion info. unless you fdisk the drive every time you format and reinstall windows or copy file from it to another pc you infect the other pc. there are a few new virus that can infect cmos and firmware of some hard ware now. (hp had an issue with virus on there printers). there also been new hardware and installer disk that have been infected...i read about phones and printer disks from brother having virus on them.

dhruv990 · Feb 12, 2014

smorizio :

most likely the test guys disks or cd were infected. as a tech the first mistake tech used to make and still do is use floppy disk or usb sticks and forget to break the write tab off on them so nothing can be written to burn in and test disks. you did not have a virus you had a trojan and a mbr virus. the trojan was on the mbr of the drive...with vendor restore disk that part does not get change on running a restore. most older restore used norton ghost or a cheap clone that used to do file replacment. some of the real bad virus like the monkey bar virus become the drive partion info. unless you fdisk the drive every time you format and reinstall windows or copy file from it to another pc you infect the other pc. there are a few new virus that can infect cmos and firmware of some hard ware now. (hp had an issue with virus on there printers). there also been new hardware and installer disk that have been infected...i read about phones and printer disks from brother having virus on them.

So does that mean that it's safe for me to use the enclosure with another drive?

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Can a hard drive enclosure be infected?

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