Chapter 9. About Safe & Sound - McAfee VIRUSSCAN 5.1 User Manual

9
About Safe & Sound
9
Figure 9-1. Safe & Sound window
The most important asset on your computer is the information, or data, you
create and store there. Over time, this data grows in size and value. The
storage devices where you keep this information are vulnerable to a wide
range of environmental and human factors that can damage or destroy all or
part of the data stored there.
Valuable and vulnerable disk organizational structure information is also
stored in various places on a hard drive. This includes the boot sector, partition
tables, directories, the FAT (file allocation table), and other structural
components. These structural components are used by Windows to find data
on the drive, organize it, and so on. If any one of these components is damaged
or destroyed, you will not be able to access the data you've stored on the drive.
The FAT, your drive's roadmap, points to the locations where your files are
physically stored on the drive. Files can either be stored in contiguous
locations or scattered in pieces in different places. Since files are not always
stored contiguously, the FAT information becomes even more indispensable
than if files were stored one after another, end to end. If a drive's file allocation
table becomes corrupt or scrambled (such as may be caused by a virus), your
computer will be unable to find and assemble all the pieces of your files. This
is true even if all the files' data still exists.
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