> I would guess it would be incredibly hard to make
a "disk" virus
> that would work on greatly differing OS's like Linux AND Windows.
This is actually a good reason to encrypt your whole disk. The disk
can't serve up working malware if the bits it returns get mangled by
decryption with an unknown(-to-the-disk) key before being used.
Of course, this will generally mean booting off something other than
the disk in question; that thing then becomes a possible target for
attack. But this can be made more or less arbitrarily hard for the
attacker - consider network booting from a bootserver that isn't even
running the same ISA as the client....
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