🚀 go-pugleaf

jhp@apss.ab.ca (Herb Presley, Emergency Planning Officer) writes:

> I have had a problem with the "Stoned" virus on my 8088 based XT.
> After the virus appeared on Christmas Day, I reformatted (high level)
> the hard drive and reconfigured the partition table using FDISK.

Repartitioning and reformatting is a rather drastic way to deal with
"Stoned".  F-PROT and SCAN will both remove the infection fairly
easily.  However, none of these measures will be effective if the
virus is still resident in memory.  You can repartition all you like,
"Stoned" will just pop right back in to your "clean" system unless you
first boot from a clean source.

Also, did you check your floppy disks?
> Although the message appeared on Christmas Day, the only problem that
>
> I'm not even sure if the problems are related.
>
> Remember that the RAMDRIVE.SYS load worked prior to the appearance of the
> "Stoned" virus.  I didn't change any parameters prior to that time.

I'm not sure they are related either.  You say "Stoned" "appeared" on
Christmas Day: how do you know that?  Are you referring to the "Your
PC is now Stoned" message?  If so, you should know that the infection
could have occured long before that.  The message only appears on "1
in 8" boots, and its appearance is randomly generated.  It might have
been in your system for a long time before you got the message.

I suggest you get a copy of F-PROT and check your system *and* floppy
disks again.  Since you are in Canada, you get antiviral programs and
information from the SUZY Information Service.  Check out the
INtegrity section of the Information Networks.