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Can a virus infect if it's on a USB drive?

Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2016 3:32 pm
by ohaya
Hi,

I (possibly stupidly) bought a supposedly "new" 2.5" drive off of Ebay, and I received it yesterday. I put it into a USB 3.0 enclosure that I had, and then, I don't remember which I did first, but I think I plugged it into my laptop and then booted the laptop (which has BIBM installed) and I got black screen.

I shutdown the laptop and unplugged the drive and then restarted and the laptop booted ok.

So I took the drive to one of my desktops and plugged it into a USB enclosure while in Windows 7 and I could see that the drive already had a System Reserved partition and another, like 500+GB partition and clicking on that partition (Drive letter I:) I could see that it looked like a Windows installation.

I ran both Malwarebytes scan and Avast full scan on both the System Reserved partition and also on the I: drive and Avast claimed that it found something in the pagefile.sys on the I: drive, "MBR:Cidor-C[rtk]" which I gather is a rootkit in the MBR (but it was found in the I:\pagefile.sys).

So now I'm wondering: Given the above (what I did so far, and what I described I found):

a) Is there any way that that virus could've gotten installed to either my laptop or to that desktop?

b) Could that virus (or something else) on that drive, in a USB enclosure, have caused my laptop to blackscreen?

Thanks,
Jim