🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun28.042703.16945@cse.uta.edu> mcgee@cse.uta.edu (Robert M. McGee) writes:
>I had a strange event occur with my pc the other day. I do not know if
>it has anything to do with a virus, so I'm asking if anyone knows of a
>virus with these characteristics.  Here's what happened:
>
>I exited Procomm and got a error reading drive c: message.
>Then I pressed the reset button and after all the ROM diagnostics had
>completed I got a disk boot failure error.

Hmm... do you recall the exact message?  Was it something like "HDD Controller
Failure" , "Error Loading Operating System" , "Non-System Disk or Disk Error.
Replace and Strike a key..." or "Bad or Missing COMMAND.COM" ?  Most people
report one of those as a boot failure, and they all have different meanings.

>
>The next thing I did was to boot off a floppy and run Nortons disk
>test program which told me I had dozens of cluster read errors that
>were unmarked and could be used or were already being used by files.

Okay, the NUMBER ONE reason I get calls from people asking about lost
allocation units is disk-caching software.  There are a lot of disk
cache programs that buffer disk writes, that is, they allow the user to
make a bunch of little writes to disk, hold them in RAM until they
fill up a buffer, and then flush the buffer to disk (perform all the
small disk writes at once).  This speeds up disk I/O, but it you
reboot your machine or power down while there is still stuff in the
cache, then >POOF< it's gone.  This is particularly bad if there
was only a partially completed disk write in the cache, i.e., a file
was left open on the disk, or a file was saved to disk.

>
>I turned the power off to the machine for about 20 sec. And it booted
>normally when powered up.
>I ran the Norton program again and got no errors.  I also ran a
>(older version) virus check on all the drives and found nothing.
Have you tried cold booting off a DOS Boot Disk and checking with the
Norton Disk Test program?  If the disk errors appear then, it could be 
that you might have a "stealth" type virus that hides itself when loaded
in from the hard disk (unlikely, but a possibility).  Make sure that the
DOS Boot Disk you boot from has a w/p tab on it.  And you may wish to
get a newer virus checking program.  Fridrik Skulason has just recently
released a new version of F-PROT and Ross Greenburg recently released a
new version of t the VIREX-PC Demo Version (detects but doesn't remov.
Some other anti-viral companies have recently released new versions of
their software, too.

>
>I haven't had any problems since.  Wierd.
I agree.  Weird.

>
>mcgee@cse.uta.edu
>
>
>-- 
>_________________________________________________________________________
>                                 | Mark McGee
>                                 | News System Manager
>                                 | The University of Texas at Arlington


Aryeh Goretsky
McAfee Associates Technical Support
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