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Article #3069

FDISK /MBR and Boot Sector Viruses (PC)

#3069
From: A. Padgett Peterson
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1992 17:29
38 lines
2206 bytes
>From: (decided that this is unnecessary)

>The FDISK/MBF will NOT work right on drives that are partitioned by
>DiskManager program. If you have a DOS/DM drive and you boot from a
>clean floppy to use FDISK/MBR, your DM partition is lost.  The DM
>partition, for that matter, is any NON-DOS partition.

NO ! (excuse the shout) FDISK /MBR does NOT lose DM partitions.
PERIOD.  (there are ignorant minds out there seeking elucidation and
mis-information can be worse than none at all)

(nor STACKER, nor SUPERSTOR, nor NOVELL partitions, nor
Bernoulli/Syquest drives) What happens is that when you boot from a
floppy without the proper driver in the CONFIG.SYS file *on the
floppy* they will not be accessable by DOS. Those partitions will not
be "lost", you just have not loaded the necessary driver to access
them.

Admittedly, the DMDRIVER.BIN is the most dangerous since it is
essentially unique to each system and if it is damaged could fail to
find the partition (I could but if you have to ask, you can't), but
FDISK/MBR has no effect on DMDRIVER.BIN (or anything other than the
code portion of the MBR which knows nothing about partitions other
than how to find the ACTIVE one).

You must realize that DMDRIVER.BIN is a "kludge" from back in the
antidiluvian days of DOS 2.x that permitted access of over-32 MB hard
disks with a special driver that replaced the DOS access mechanism.
After DOS 3.31/DOS 3.3+ which could access big disks (DOS 5.0 does it
better), such drivers became unnecessary though DOS still permits such
drivers today. ONTRACK never removed the capability (at least my Disk
Manager 4.0 has it) since it costs nothing to leave it in, but it has
been superceeded by the LARGE capability built into FDISK and FORMAT
today.

					Warmly,

						Padgett
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From: padgett@tccslr.dnet.mmc.com (A. Padgett Peterson)
Newsgroups: comp.virus
Subject: FDISK /MBR and Boot Sector Viruses (PC)
Message-ID: <0001.9211101922.AA06969@barnabas.cert.org>
Date: 3 Nov 92 17:29:31 GMT
Sender: virus-l@lehigh.edu
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Approved: news@netnews.cc.lehigh.edu