Virus File types

[Almasy]

So now that Christmas is over and I'm set up with a new external, I'm ready to wipe my comp and get everything working right again. But before I go moving my college papers, pictures and overly large music list, I want to make sure I'm not putting anything horrible on the external. I've looked at numerous forums and articles about what types of files viruses can hide in and I really don't know what to believe anymore. Some say only .exe and .bats, some say JPEGs and MP3s can even be infected. Some say this is all legit and other say its all lies. I'm so horribly lost.....again! So if anyone has the skinny on this it would be really great to get some straight answers so I don't go messin up the new hard drive right out of the box. Thanks guys!

[multikoor]

I've never heard of an infected image file - sometimes viruses are hid by having a double extension (for examble "image.jpeg.exe").

Microsoft Office documents can contain macros with malicious code in them - but you can prevent this by setting up macro security.

Some ones to watch out for would be as following:

.exe
.com
.bat
.cmd
.js
.vbs
.hta

There are way more than that, as html files can contain virii too, not to mention files insize archives (rar, zip, etc...)

Good luck in being virus-free Been there, done that, I hate it too!