James Willard
james@whispering.org
>
> Well, I stand very much corrected. Dropped in to my friendly neighbourhood
> computer dealer this evening to find two (2) people standing there with
> their PCs. Both had the same symptom: totally black screens on power-up.
>
> Apparently the Chernobyl (aka CIH) virus _has_ struck.
>
> BUT the good news, at least for followers of this thread, is: if your PC can
> boot (or indeed display any message at all), you most likely don't have the
> CIH virus, because it trashes your CMOS. I suppose it might trash your disk
> instead if it has trouble writing to the CMOS, but I haven't seen that
> mentioned on any of the A-V sites I visited.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> |\ | o _ |/ Life's like a jigsaw
> | \| | |_ |\ You get the straight bits
> But there's something missing in the middle
>
> Nick Brown, Strasbourg, France (Nick(dot)Brown(at)coe(dot)fr)
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: BROWN Nick [SMTP:Nick.BROWN@coe.fr]
> > Sent: 26 April 1999 15:29
> > To: 'Allan M. Wind'
> > Cc: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
> > Subject: RE: WAY OT--Crisis...virus! Need help
> >
> > >> There is a virus due to activate about now. We made today a
> > holiday in
> > >> South Australia - should have done the same at Penn, perhaps.
> > >That's the first positive impact, I've ever seen, a virus had.
> > Don't
> > >get any ideas now!
> >
> > My money is on it _not_ being a virus, given the number of partition table
> > sectors (and disks generally) world-wide which will go belly-up today like
> > any other day. Out of 2x10**8 PCs, I'd expect something like 1x10**5 to
> > have a serious disk problem on any given day, by the time you combine HD
> > MTBF and good old-fashioned bugs. And of course, people screwing up with
> > FDISK and blaming a virus when their boss asks why they haven't got any
> > work
> > done.
> >
> > One way to make a backup of your partition table sector (MBR) for next
> > time
> > :-) would appear to be:
> > dd if=/dev/hda of=/floppy/savembr bs=512 count=1
> >
> > [off-topic] I wrote a DOS version of this, too, as part of my free DOS
> > anti-virus stuff I did about 6 years ago (when DOS viruses such as Stoned,
> > Form, etc were the main problem). It saves the MBR and the active boot
> > sector in a magic file, so you can later restore them, or compare them
> > against the current live versions to detect viruses, etc. About twice a
> > year I would undo somebody's FDISKing, to their total amazement.
> >
> > |\ | o _ |/ Life's like a jigsaw
> > | \| | |_ |\ You get the straight bits
> > But there's something missing in the middle
> >
> >
> > -
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>
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>
-- James D. Willard | Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Novell/Win/DOS/Minix User james@whispering.org | finger james@whispering.org for PGP Public Key #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) .,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,.,-=-,- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/