The most commonly used method of protecting against and detecting viruses is to purchase a third party application designed to scan for all types of viruses. Programs such as Norton Anti-virus, McAfee Anti-virus, or ZoneAlarm Anti-virus.

Alternatively a user can look at various aspects of the computer and detect possible signs indicating a virus is on the computer. While this method can be used to determine some viruses it cannot clean or determine the exact virus you may or may not have.

Another method is to check fdisk. In fdisk choose four to display the partition information if you have multiple partitions such which have scrambled text such as % or strange characters this can be another indication of a virus on the computer.