OFF: virus help

[Eric Siegerman]

[I was going to reply to Mike privately, but this is important
for other listmembers to read as well, in case you have something
similar happen some day.]

Mike, the first thing to do is: STOP MUCKING ABOUT WITH IT!

If you have a friend who knows how to deal with this stuff,
call him/her and ask them to take a look at it.

It might well be possible to recover some/most/all of your data.
But the more you mess with it, the less likely that gets -- your
poking and prodding can easily damage things further.  A
computer's file system (how it organizes and keeps track of all
the stuff on the disk) is a pretty fragile thing; once a minor
problem crops up, further use of the machine can turn it into a
major problem (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not
at all ...  but you don't find out which until it's too late).

Imagine spilling an ounce or two of coffee on your desk.  If you
shepherd the spill in the right direction, you can minimize the
damage or eliminate it entirely.  But if you dive in with bare
hands and with your eyes closed, you're as likely to *increase*
the damage (number of papers stained, etc.) as to decrease it.
Hard drive problems are very similar in that respect.

The same goes for Windows, Mac, UNIX, whatever; this is NOT a
system-specific warning.

Good luck!


On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 11:15:31AM +0000, M Holmes wrote:
> Having seen various messages about viruses pass by the list, I thought
> maybe those with experience could offer advice.
>
> Last night, after copying some CDR's I shut down the (Win 95)computer. What I
> saw was massive and prolonged hard disc access followed by a message
> "Unable to access drive C:" (That's the system drive on my PC) After
> that it failed to pick up the boot drive on bootup. I put in a boot
> floppy, did a SYS A: C: and then booted from the hard drive. I got the
> system up and immediately upgraded the McAffee data files. I then tried
> to upgrade the McAfee product and got a failure mssage, followed again
> by massive hard drive activity. This time I powered down. Now even with
> the boot floppy I can only get DOS and the A: drive up. It can't see the
> hard drive at all and it's not detected at the hardware boot.
>
> Lucy checked her work machine and found BADTRANS B virus and had it
> cleaned.
>
> So the question is whether these rather worrisome symptoms are
> consistent with that virus or whether it's something else.
>
> Cheers
>
> FoFP
--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
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