[DKTaber]

I use Avira Antivir as my AV program. Whenever I do a scan, it invariably comes up with 7 warnings. The report shows the "warnings" to be scans of the master boot sectors, and indicates "the device is not ready", plus scans of hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys (which are 2GB+ files) where it says "the file could not be opened".

Q1: Do I need to be concerned about scanning these sectors/files, which I assume are active after Windows loads and can only be scanned before Windows loads.

Q2: If I should scan them, what's the best way to do that (e.g., Safe Mode)?

[lunarlander]

hiberfil.sys is created when your PC goes into hibernation/sleep . Pagefile.sys is the memory swap file that is used when the system needs to use more RAM than you have. I know the pagefil is locked at all times by Windows, so you cannot read/scan it. I guess the same is true of hiberfil.