Managing the Heterogeneous File System for Anti-Virus

Computer viruses are increasing in number and are continually intellectualized as well. To cope with this problem, anti-virus tools such as a scanner and the monitoring program have been developed. But it is not guaranteed that these softwares will work in safety under MS-DOS' control. If the virus is run first, it can avoid the monitoring of anti-virus software or even can attack the anti-virus software. Therefore, anti-virus programs should be run before the system is infected. This paper presents a new PC starting mechanism which allows the PC system to start from a clean state after booting. For this mechanism, we build a new disk file system different from DOS' file system, and manage the two file systems heterogeneously. Our system is strong against boot viruses and recovers from infections automatically.