| 摘要 |
The invention restricts the corruption or destruction of data held on a storage medium forming part of a computer system by hostile programs such as "viruses". Presently known methods and apparatus depend upon user discipline, and/or hardware and/or software modification, and/or knowledge of virus signatures. The invention, however, provides a method and apparatus employing a ''Supervisor'' which controls the reading, writing and formatting of sectors within partitions of a storage medium. The control is dependent upon which type of partition the sector is within, i.e. the boot partition, or an active or inactive general partition, and which type of data the sector contains, i.e. operating system or user information. The Supervisor may be implemented in hardware or firmware, and preferably provides a processor (14) which is inaccessible to the user and to any virus contained in any partition of, for example, a hard disk. |
