I have an SSD, a 1TB 5400RPM WD 2.5" laptop drive, and a 1TB 7200RPM Hitachi 2.5" laptop drive. For some reason, Avast boost scan ALWAYS scans the Hitachi drive after it finishes scanning my other drives. It doesn’t matter if I have other SATA drives or USB drives plugged in, it won’t scan the Hitachi drive until the very end. Changing the drive letter or the SATA port doesn’t stop it from being scanned last. This has been the case through multiple installations of Windows (7 and 8 ) and 2 computers (1 laptop 1 desktop). I have used both Avast free and Avast Internet (trial).
The Hitachi drive is usually D:, Western Digital is E:, SSD is C:. When Hitachi is D: it gets scanned last. If I change Hitachi to E: and WD to D:, Hitachi still gets scanned last. If I add external drives (F: / G: / H:) it will still scan Hitachi (D:) last.
The drive letters are displayed correctly during the boot-scan.
Even the case of the drive letter is the same (i.e. isn’t it e.g. C:\something, but d:\something)?
Anyway, the list of drives is received from the mount manager - so the order may be arbitrary. I believe they are sorted before getting scanned, so it is somehow interesting, but I certainly wouldn’t expect any virus to be involved.
Ok thank you for the information. Just some more interesting info:
-Avast Full System Scan scans the discs in proper order (C: > D: > E:)
-so do Malwarebytes and Kaspersky Rescue Disc
This is unrelated to the Hitachi ordering question, but I was wondering if a storage HDD can get a MBR or firmware virus, and if it can infect / spread to other drives just by plugging it into a computer (assuming that the computer’s C: drive just got a clean install of Windows 8 ).