🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Hill (sjh@tardis.ed.ac.uk) wrote:
: I am trying to fix a 486 Laptop, which is a fairly anonymous and chunky
: thing... It is reporting a HDD error (NOT a controller error) and it
: cannot see its floppy drive.

Steve,

Don't want to worry you but this sounds a little like the effects of that
rather nasty Chernoybyl (excuse the spelling) virus that was around a
while ago (26th April or was it May activation date). It corrupts the
FAT of the hard drive and has the ability to wipe or corrupt in some way
the Bios on some machines.

Thanks to a friend who should have known better (ta Paul) my desktop PC
caught it but it didn't manage to kill the BIOS so I still had the floppy
drive and used AVPDOS to fix the hard drive (although I did lose
everything on it). 

Don't quote me on this but I believe that a new BIOS chip may be required.
This may be very tricky on a laptop as they have a tendancy to be
soldered in or even a fixed part of the motherboard. A friend of the
infecter of my machine now uses his laptop as a paperweight (unless he's
sold it to you......).

Sorry for the doom and gloom and I hope its something else - the BIOS
battery perhaps.

Andy

Ahhh just noted the reference to a LINUX newsgroup in the header. The virus I
mentioned was WIN32 executable only so I'm probably talking bollocks.....