Disabling Virus Protection
Virus Protection/Virus Warning
This setting has one of the most misleading names of all of the parameters in the BIOS. The system BIOS has no way at all to tell which programs are viruses, and which are wanted/actual programs. When enabled, this setting will trap any and all writes to the hard disk's master boot record, and display a message to the screen each time asking if you are willing to allow the write. Since one common type of virus is the boot sector infector, this can help in preventing the spread of these viruses.
However, it will also cause the BIOS to display its warning message for any legitimate access to the boot sector. So if you are using any utilities that modify partitions, or even if you are reformatting your hard disk, this message will pop up unexpectedly. You can however just “authorize” the BIOS, asking it to proceed with the write, but this can become rather annoying if it happens often. It can also be quite confusing to someone who doesn't understand the meaning of these BIOS message.
Some people prefer the safety of having this enabled; others find it annoying and turn it off. Most people don't usually run utilities that modify the boot sector regularly. When turned off, you might probably find a similar feature, more elegantly implemented, in a memory-resident anti-virus program.
