Computer hard drives consist of sectors, and each sector contains a segment of data. The boot sector is the first sector of every hard drive. A boot sector virus, which comes from an infected floppy disk, affects the first sector of a hard drive. The boot sector of the infected hard drive loads first, sending the virus into every partition and piece of data. The virus infects the computer’s memory or RAM. Computer processors are incapable of reading or writing data if their RAM is corrupted. The virus will subtract 2,048 bytes of total memory available when a disk check is performed. Symptoms of a boot sector virus are missing files on the hard drive, corrupt system files and failure of the computer to start up.
