Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: What does "Probable Non-DOS disk" mean?
Message-ID: <31402@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 89 16:01:57 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Distribution: na
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 20

ho@fergvax.unl.edu <918@unocss..unl.edu> :
-
-Me too.  What happens is the 'media byte' in the first sector of the FAT
-gets clobbered.  I've never quite figured out why.
-
-I have a sneaking suspicion that, since lots of other people seem to have the 
-problem, it is a bug in DOS which occasionally corrupts the media byte under
-certain unusual conditions.  

And me.  I never figured out why, either.  I use Zenith's MS-DOS v3.21.

Paranoia time:  It could be the smoothest virus we've (not) seen.  If
*I* was gonna write a virus to stroke my ego, this is exactly how it
would act --- not destructive, just annoying at unexpected times.
Infrequent enough that victims just fix it and keep the fix in mind "in
case it happens again".  Slow and deep, so nobody picks up any
correlations between this or that program, and the changed media byte.

Hmmm...at what point do we lose the ability to distinguish between a bug
in DOS, and a virus in DOS?