Helix, there is no reason for me to suspect you have take a microbiology course, but the step from virus to bacteria is HUGE. A virus no way contains the entire blueprint for a cell! It contains a BIT, a TINY bit, of genetic material, which often alters the cellular metabolism of the cell is invades/enters.
Here are a few quotes from The Way of the Cell, Franklin Harold (2001, Oxford University Press)
"A bacterial cell consists of more than three hundred million molecules (not counting water), several thousand different kinds of molecules, and requires some 2000 genes for its specification. There is nothing random about this assemblage, which reproduces itself with constant composition and form generation after generation." (10-11)
"Even those for whom life is simply the expression of the instructions encoded in the genes acknowledge that it takes cellular machinery to implement those instructions...Growth and division refer not simply to the accretion of biomolecules, but to the replication of an integrated pattern of functions and structures." (99)
"What pulls together the cacophany of molecules and ion channels and regulated pathways into a coherent whole: a cylinder with rounded caps [E.coli], quickly and every time? If a cell is an orchestra and DNA the score, who or what conducts?...Here we reach an edge, and are left comtemplating the disquieting notion of an orchestra without a conductor." (113)
I hope that helps a bit.