Method and apparatus for controlling access to and corruption of information in computer systems

There is disclosed a method and apparatus for controlling access to and corruption of information in a computer system. In known "PC Virus" protection methods the boot partition becomes "Read Only" when the system is in Supervised Mode. However, Microsoft Windows, although not strictly self-modifying, does require that certain files located within the Windows directory, can be written to. Accordingly the present invention provides a method of controlling access to and modification of information stored on a storage medium forming part of a computer system comprising: dividing information stored on the storage medium into a plurality of non-overlapping partitions including a boot partition and at least one general partition, characterised by: designating at least one of said partitions a Write Many Recoverable (WMR) partition wherein, in use, if a write command is issued to overwrite any resident information stored in a/the WMR partition by updating information is written on the storage medium in a location other than where the resident information is stored and a (virtual) pointer to the updated information is set up/kept so that the updated information can be accessed, as required during a remainder of a session.