A system and method that marks whenever a sector on a hard drive is altered. A protected archive bit is maintained for each sector on the hard drive in a secured fashion. Authenticated requests are able to reset the protected archive bit. When a file is changed, the hard drive marks the sectors of the program that have been altered. When the virus protection application executes, it retrieves the sectors that have been altered, identifies the files that correspond to such sectors, and scans the identified files. If a virus has attacked the computer and attached itself to one of the files, the file is identified and scanned and the virus is discovered with appropriate eradication actions performed. An authentication scheme is assigned to a hard drive with a secret that is shared between the drive and the virus protection program and stored in a secure location.