I have an external hard drive can I install a virus program on it so that I can take it to another system and then run the virus program on that system. Will this be a problem because the drive letter will change or will it not matter because the file structure will not change only the drive letter. I have never tried to do anything like this so I am wondering if you all could help me on this. Thanks for the help.

I hope you mean virus scanner? If its an actual virus, I doubt it cares about drive letters. Your best bet would be to look for some off brand virus scanner. The big ones all make heaver use of the registry. There is also Norton emergency AV disks. There may be a way to move them to the external drive and make it bootable. This will require the PC you plug it into to allow boot from USB device. Give me a better idea of exactly how you would like it to function.

Yeah I meant a virus scanner. Looking back that sounded a little bad. I do some small time computer work for some people and I was wondering if this would be possible. I would rather just rather hook up the jump drive to a system so I could run the scan from there. A friend of mine had an ftp client on his jump drive and used it from the jump drive. Now would this be about the same. Or would it all depend on the virus scanner that is being used/installed on the external drive. I know that you said that some of the bigger virus software uses the registry. Now this I think is going to be a stupid question but would it matter if the resistry was different every time it is run? Now that I think about it this may be harder then I thought it was. Again thanks for the help.

If you want to pursue that I would recommend one of the free antivirus programs. With Norton, and similar programs, you would be violating the user agreement at the least. I also suspect it would not work on a PC that didn't have the proper registry entries. That's a guess though as I have never tried it.

Most Windows programs have to be installed on the PC to work. You can't run them from an external drive because the registry entries won't exist.

I echo the other recommendations to use one of the WEB based scanners instead.

Hi,
No, it won't work using your external drive on another computer to run a virus scan.
You will have to use the other computer to connect to the web, and then run a free program to scan online. A good one is at:

http://www.antivirus.com

Also, if you would like to install a good, free Antivirus Program on the other computer, with downloading weekly Antivirus Definitions, you can get one at:

http://www.download.com/Avast-Home-E...ml?tag=lst-0-3

There are also other free antivirus programs, which you can check out at http://www.cnet.com/downloads.

Just for information:
If you wish to add or subtract from an Experts' reputation, or show appreciation or discontent with
An answer, click on the "balance scales" icon by the Experts' name. You can then choose what you wish.

Best wishes,
fredg

Thanks for the info guys and girls. It has been helpful.