OFF: virus help

[Neil Ward]

Mike wrote:

> It certainly gives that impression. Are there viruses that can access
> the CMOS to mess with the bootup?
>

Yes there are, although BADTRANS B you mention is not one of them. The worst
such virii can do is to alter the CMOS settings. Entering the BIOS setup on
boot (usually pressing DEL key) and selecting 'Detect Hard Drives' should
always detect your drives, even if a virus has previously erased any
settings.

> It's less than a year old. I think it was a Diamond 60Gb drive, though I
> could check.

Infant failure then. We had a pile of drives failed in under 6 months here
at one time, all different makes too, it was uneconomical to send them back
to the distributor. The girls in the office use the discs as mirrors after I
pulled them apart. In a world of microelectronics, a hard drive is like a
steam engine, clonky and old fashioned, and that's being unfair to steam
engines.

>
> Well the system and files as of 10 months ago are on the 8Gb drive that
> I disconnected when the new drive went in. Hopefully if that's
> reconnected then I can recover function.
>

Sounds like best idea to get you going quickly.

>
> I'd lose some Hawkwind files I'd started work on and some other
> stuff. It'd be annoying given the time spent working on it but there it
> is. I'd meant to set up a backup system using the 8Gb drive but some
> glitch on the motherboard prevented both drives being connected at once.
>

If it is really valuable to you there are data recovery specialists, eg
http://www.ultratec.co.uk/mainframe.html or
http://www.host-it.co.uk/datarecovery/default.htm. But cheap they are not.

> Messing about with LS120's or CDRs for backup just seemed more trouble
> than it would be worth. Maybe I'll rethink that now. What backup
> systems/strategies do you folks use on home systems?
>

CDRs are cheap, portable and fairly permanent, best solution for the average
user I'd say. http://www.ntibackupnow.com do a backup/restore utility that
can span CDs for greater than 650Mb of data (my compressed video of HW
Edinburgh gig spans 3), and can do incremental backups (only changes since
last backup). Most other backup programs seem to be for tape drives, which
to me appear to be less reliable than the hard drives...

Neil.