Ok, I'm going to install linux soon, and I have some old cd's with some stuff i want to put on linux, so i poped them in this pc and norton said some of them have virus'.... my question is that if I try to copy some of these files in linux will they mess it up or something? because I've heard that linux is immune to virus' by alot of people, but some people (only some) say its not so should i just scrap the old cd's and forget about those files?

Even if you assume viruses for Linux are feasible, they have to be designed for Linux. That means all of your .exe files will not execute in Linux. Don't worry about viruses in Linux, seriously. Are these Word documents? If they are, save them as Rich Text Format (.rtf instead of .doc), just to be extra safe (and make sure you don't pass those viruses on to other Windows users).

EDIT: sorry, confused about question.

If you got the CD's from someone you know or a buisiness or downloaded the official versions, then it's most likely that norton is confused. I wouldn't worry.

PS: The plural of virus is either "viruses" or "viri" (or "virii").

Actually the plural of virus is "viruses" and never "viri" (which is Latin for "men") and never "verii" which is just plain wrong as it would be the plural of the nonexistent word "virius" (following the same pattern as "radius" -> "radii")

As for the question...Norton would detect windows viruses. These would only harm windows because they are coded specifically for flaws in that OS (hence there are so many viruses ). For a virus to have any effect on linux it would have to be written specifically for linux...and as linux has far better precautionary security (like never signing in as the superuser unless doing a specific admin task) viruses have never had much luck with it.

Yeah I'd never heard of the last two either, but that's what Wikipedia said.

Wikipedia is great, but it's written by anyone who wants to write it...so it's not always right