somehow my school, a Pre-University (big organisation) can have viruses floating around school networks infecting thumb drives and HDDs is there a protable Anti-Virus for HDDs? the virus/trijan is achi.htm, achi.dll or achi.vbs. and i am very scared of plugging in my HDD into my comp(home) for fear of viruses...

There are several things you can do:

• Don't use the disk at school ;-)
  
• Disable autostart for all drives on your PC at home, change your explorer view to show you ALL files, even hidden and system files and watch out for those autostart files and remove them form your disk.
  
• Scan your disc with a very good and updated antivirus-software every time when you got home (don't use sophos - its the worst scanner I know).
  
• As long as no code is executed, a virus can reside on your hdd without harming your PC, just be carefull with the files you exchange.
  
• Some Disks can be writeprotected, but Windoofs does not like this, and you won't be able to write data to it on school.
  
• Use Linux/BSD/MacOS at home and don't bother with Viruses/Trojans/Spyware etc.
  

Greetings, Chris

Simple? USB-to-SD Card adapter. Flip the tiny "read only" switch on the SD card.

Some USB drives have a read-only switch, i.e. these

Hardcore? Forensics-grade write blocker: http://www.tableau.com/index.php?pageid=docs&doc=t8

Edited August 22, 200718 yr by SmaugyGrrr

or create a bartpe cd with virusscan on it and scan your drive before plugging it in to a running system.