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From: ragg0270@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Richard Alan Gerber)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: A2000HD Clock mystery
Summary: Mysterious clock fix
Keywords: Clock, Virus?, mystery
Message-ID: <1990Dec6.150357.17490@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 15:03:57 GMT
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 32

Here's a little mystery for you all:

The system clock on my new A2000HD started running fast last weekend and
kept doing so after numerous cold and warm reboots for three days solid. I 
thought it was probably a hardware problem, especially since the 
computer was roughed up quite a bit during shipping.

So while I was waiting for my local dealer to check it out (which he
never did), someone mentioned that a virus might be the cause. VirusX
hadn't reported anything, but I had ftp'd some programs off some Fish
disks, so I decided to check further.

I knew that the ColdCapture vector was non-zero (as reported by VirusX
and ARTM), but I thought that was due to "SetPatch r" command in the
startup-sequence. Just to make sure, I removed the "r" option from
SetPatch and rebooted. This had two effects; (1) ColdCapture was zero,
(2) the clock ran at normal speed. Replacing the "r" option to SetPatch
made ColdCapture non-zero again, but the clock still ran like a charm and
has now for three days.

Question: Is this just a coincidence, or did I have some sort of virus?
This is not an intermittant thing. It never ran fast for a week, ran fast
for three days solid, and hasn't gained a second during the last three
days. While the clock was running fast, it still did so when I warm re-booted
off a floppy. Unfortunately, I never tried a cold boot (turning the 
computer off) off a floppy.

Thanks for any insights on this matter.

Richard
gerber@rigel.astro.uiuc.edu
ragg0270@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu