How to protect my portable HDD from crap?

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feo

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I have a 20GB 2.5" HDD in a casing which I sometimes take with me to campus if I need to transfer stuff between home and varsity.

Now I've come home 2 or 3 times and when I connect it to my PC I find that the external is infected with crap and I have to format it to get it clean again.

Now, I just download a portable app called Clam Win Portable and I'd like to know if it's really effective in protecting my ext HDD.

Ideally, I want a piece of software that launches and runs in the background as soon as I connect my HDD (kinda like how NOD32 just sits in the taskbar and scans my PC). Any recommendations?
 
(a) Don't connect your HDD to a PC that has crap on it :)

(b) If you have to, you could try a protection app loaded on the HDD as an autorun - but between the drive being detected and the protection app starting up, any moderately efficient virus will have already written to the drive

(c) Accept that it's not secure and scan & disinfect the HDD when you connect it to your home machine - as in the old days of stiffies

(d) Anything more secure than the above would have to have to format the HDD in some kind of secret filesystem, and you'd only be able to copy to/from it using special software. I don't know of any such app and I don't think it's a good idea ... but it's technically possible.
 
e) crap all over the useless IT admins
 
I've been thinking about this recently too. I'm thinking maybe changing the file permissions to something username specific instead of generic "administrators" etc. Should protect existing data from modifications. But I've not tested it yet.

I'm more stressed about the MBR on the drive. I don't think that gets clean by a format.

Are you talking varsity or res? If its varsity then shove a boot up the admins ass as per razor's suggestion.
 
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