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From: apm233m@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Stoned virus - HELP!!!
Message-ID: <82584.2771f44b@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au>
Date: 21 Dec 90 00:38:51 GMT
References: <1990Dec20.165152.25913@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Organization: Computer Centre, Monash University, Australia
Lines: 26

In article <1990Dec20.165152.25913@ccu.umanitoba.ca>, goyal@ccu.umanitoba.ca writes:
> 
> i have got a stoned virus in the partition table of my hard disk
> and utilities like flushot, viruscan are no help
> any help would be greatly appreciated!
> 
MS-DOS maintains (but does not use) two copies of the partition table.
If you wrote NOTHING to your disk since it got "stoned" then you should
still have one good copy of the partition table and it is not too difficult
to write a small program to copy the good over the bad (I have done this
some time ago but the program which I have may or may not be suitable for
your particular machine).

The bad news is that if ANYTHING has been written to disk using the MS-DOS
functions then you will now have two identically corrupted copies of the
partition table and you will find it difficult to retrieve some of the files
from your disk - note that you should not have lost all of your files though.
There are several things you can do to retrieve as much as you can from the
disk, but for the most part it amounts to (the equivalent of) deleting those
files which use the corrupted parts of the FAT.

-----------------------------------------------
Bill Metzenthen
Mathematics Department
Monash University
Melbourne Australia