Simple enough to without any AV software, especially if running older versions of commonly exploited software (acrobat reader for example has more holes than a sieve (to the point that I recommend against people using it in favour of other (and arguably better) readers) and there are numerous other commonly exploited applications with flaws of varying severity ) -although if it did actually cause damage to a system file to render it unbootable, my money would be on something other than malware - most malware these days wants a PC NOT to be damaged so they can use it as a bot or extract data from it, rather than cause damage.
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