DATA PROCESSING VIRUS PROTECTION CIRCUITRY INCLUDING A PERMANENT MEMORY FOR STORING A REDUNDANT PARTITION TABLE

A virus protection system, which may be coupled to an external input/output port of a disk operated data processing system, includes a read only memory in which a redundant partition table is stored, duplicating a partition table on the disk. The virus detection system further includes detection logic which monitors a transfer of data from the disk to a system random access memory and which detects data transfers to a high region of the system memory during initial portions of the transfer. When a virus is detected, the redundant partition table is written onto the disk.