Messages in this thread | | | From | BROWN Nick <> | Subject | RE: WAY OT--Crisis...virus! Need help | Date | Mon, 26 Apr 1999 15:29:12 +0200 |
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>> 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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