Can a DOS virus survive and spread on an OS/2 system using the HPFS file system?
Yes, both file-infecting and boot sector viruses can infect HPFS partitions. File-infecting viruses function normally and can activate and do their dirty deeds, and boot sector viruses can prevent OS/2 from booting if the primary bootable partition is infected. Viruses that try to directly address disk sectors cannot function because OS/2 prevents this activity. Under OS/2 2.0, could a virus infected DOS session infect another DOS session? Each DOS program is run in a separate Virtual DOS Machine (their memory spaces are kept separated by OS/2). However, any DOS program has almost complete access to the files and disks, so infection can occur if the virus infects files; any other DOS session that executes a program infected by a virus that makes itself memory resident would itself become infected.
