can one drive transfer a virus to another drive?

[demonikal]

I was done fixing a computer for someone. Then when he came to pick up the computer, two days after everything worked perfectly, me having not touched it for those two days, it started, recognized the new drive and extra two sticks of RAM I put in, but would not boot into Windows. I never clicked on anything in his computer, the hard drive I added was virus-free, and I did a full-format (not a quick format) after scanning it for viruses, and I never even connected his computer to my network.

I scanned his hard drive after he left home ticked off and I found a Win32 PUP Trojan virus. I scanned his hard drive on my desktop. This was two days ago. I also scanned my computer for the heck of it and found nothing. Then I asked him if he wanted to do more work on it to try and fix the virus he got on it himself and he said to go ahead. So today, I scanned it once more, but my paid Avast antivirus program could not repair, delete, or move to virus chest the Trojan. Then I decided to do a boot time scan. So I scheduled that on my hard drive (C and his hard drive (F with a (G recovery partition. It's been over an hour and it's only 8% of the way done on my (C drive and it keeps finding corrupted CAB archives in different places on my drive. It hasn't even begun scanning his drive yet.

So, I just want to know if I take a drive that has a virus that's already been ran and I add that drive to my computer, can that virus run itself onto my internal drives, even though I've never clicked on any of his files?

He has Windows XP Professional x86 and I have Windows 7 Professional x64. I'm really freaking out and I can't find the answer to my question by just doing searches on Google.

 

[johnb35]

It's possible, depending on the infection.

 

[noonespecial]

Short answer yes.

Once I got into a heck of a fight with a customer who kept getting reinfected with the same virus.

She didn't even have internet.

Later found out that she was bringing files home from work on a thumb drive.

Would you believe she got mad because I wouldn't "warranty" the work under these circumstances.

She never called again either.

 

[demonikal]

Short answer yes.

Once I got into a heck of a fight with a customer who kept getting reinfected with the same virus.

She didn't even have internet.

Later found out that she was bringing files home from work on a thumb drive.

Would you believe she got mad because I wouldn't "warranty" the work under these circumstances.

She never called again either.

Thanks for the reply. Turns out, yeah, this guy had a trojan on his c: drive. And strangely, after I put his drive in my computer to do a virus scan on it (since I couldn't get to Windows on his pc), a few days later I found the same trojan on my c: drive in a different location.

But, I think I figured out why his computer wouldn't boot up. His Compaq Presario actually said on the HP website that it could handle 4 gigs of RAM, but it might not recognize all of it. Well, the BIOS did recognize all of it. But I didn't realize until all these shenanigans were over, that the reason his pc wouldn't boot to Windows was because it couldn't recognize any more than 2756 MB of RAM. It wouldn't even boot to Windows with 3 gigs of RAM. So, the webpage on his model of pc on hp.com was way way off on what it could handle. So it was all my own fault and I let him know this at the end. I told him he owed me nothing but he said he wanted to pay me since I was giving him 2 extra gigs of RAM for nothing and an extra hard drive twice the size of his master for nothing.

And yet, the whole time I thought it had to do with a virus he got on his own before the computer even made it to my hands. So of course after this was all over and after I told him what happened, just to be completely ethical, I felt like a complete a$$. But, I learned a lot from my first real job with someone I didn't know. I guess I always figured there was less worry about messing stuff up with close friends and family members' computers.