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PC virus question
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Jun 2001
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If a PC gets hit with a virus or worm, will zeroing the hard drive and reformatting it take care of it or is it possible that one finds a way to change and write itself onto the BIOS?
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Union County, NJ
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Originally posted by Langdon:
If a PC gets hit with a virus or worm, will zeroing the hard drive and reformatting it take care of it or is it possible that one finds a way to change and write itself onto the BIOS?
I've read of viruses that survive hard drive formatting. You might want to try http://www.sarc.com and do a search.
Mike
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Neither Here Nor There
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No. Formatting it will erase everything on the HD, including the virus.
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Jun 2001
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starman, even if you rip out the drive and zero it on a mac?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Neither Here Nor There
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Union County, NJ
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Offline
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WRONG
A virus that infects your Master Boot Sector (MBS) could survive a
high-level format because this doesn't affect your MBS at all. Also any virus
that is memory resident during a low or high-level format would be able to
reinfect the HD as soon as the low or high-level HD format was over with, or in
the case of a virus that infects your MBS right after you partition your HD
Doing it on the Mac should probably do the trick.
Mike
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Calgary
Status:
Online
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Originally posted by starman:
I've read of viruses that survive hard drive formatting. You might want to try http://www.sarc.com and do a search.
Mike
There are a small handful of PC viruses that infect the computer's BIOS rather than the operating system. These are among the few types that could survive formatting the HD. They're extremely rare since they must be written for specificly for each BIOS and as a result aren't generally very effective at propagating themselves.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Neither Here Nor There
Status:
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ok, so if it does infect the Master Boot Record, then just pop in the XP CD and go to the Recovery Console and type fixmbr. Problem solved. But most viruses don't even touch the MBR
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Union County, NJ
Status:
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Originally posted by Albert Pujols:
ok, so if it does infect the Master Boot Record, then just pop in the XP CD and go to the Recovery Console and type fixmbr. Problem solved. But most viruses don't even touch the MBR
I wouldn't feel confident with the word 'most'.
Mike
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Houston, Texas
Status:
Offline
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Originally posted by starman:
*Snip info on MBR viruses*
Ah, the good ol' days of doing tech support for Gateway. Every day we had users that lost their cd drive to some virus. "fdisk /mbr" from a boot cd was a common fix back then.
I suggest going to McAffee's or Trend Micro's websites. A lot of them have free scanners/fixers you can run that could fix your virus without having to wipe everything.
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