Partitioned Drive becoming infected?

Nothing other than whether the virus looks for other partitions to infect. Any drive in you system can become infected. And just like with a System Restore feature, if you are infected when the backup is made, your backup is obvioulsy infected and will reinstall the malware if you ever restore from the backup.

 

I misunderstood you. Yes HP has made partitions to do stuff like that. But they are not 100% protected from malware. Besides all they do is bring you back to a shipped form of installation which is normally not very useful anyway (who wants all the junk the put on a PC) and is quite often already out of date. If I were going to do that, I would prefer a clean install using the current version of the OS (like WinXP SP2 with all patches) and I would also have a CD with all other necessary software and updates (like AV's, spyware protection, firewall etc) to install before connecting to the internet or any network connection (even if it was only an internal network).

 

That's okay too. Just try to keep making updtae versions of a cd (or DVD) that has as much of the other software and updates you will need so that you can install everything before connecting. Another item you should check out which could prove to be a useful work around is: nLite

Ask any questions you may have about it over in the Software Forum. I know some users love it (like Kodo).