Virtual OS for virus removal; suggestions?

[iladelf]

Hello all,

After reading on various websites about virtual OS installations, I'd like to set up a hard drive on my machine that simply allows me to boot from it and use it as a virus/spyware cleaning dedicated machine only, but have it as a "virtual" OS so that it does not get infected, nor pass it on to any of the other drives I may have either plugged in via USB, or otherwise internally installed. I do also have the capability of using another machine as a dedicated virtual virus killer, so I suppose I could do that.

But, where to start? And what if the damned virus (like Virut) begins to replicate if I slave a drive into a virtual setup; will the changes vamoose with a reboot? And what's the easiest way to do a virtual install of an entire OS?

All new to me folks (the virtual stuff). Sounds like a great idea, but I'd like your thoughts.

 

[kentuckyjoe]

This is what I use....
http://www.virtualbox.org/

No need to dedicate a whole HDD to it, I do XP with a 5GB dynamic "virtual disk"

 

[iisjman07]

I don't know of any malware that can break through the virtual environment, some malware can detect that it's running in a virtual machine (like conficker) but I don't think they can do anything about it. For ultimate protection you could run the virtual machine from a linux machine, so if anything does break through then so what.