Virus?

[jray]

This morning when I booted my machine, I got invalid system disk, had to reformat, reinstall OS! Iknew sumthin fishy was going on, after I disconnected last night and my modem redialed by itself, behind the scenes. I should have known when I looked at the msdos.sys file and the first line was ;format. Anyone know of a particular virus that does this?

[Bovon]

Yep, I have read about that. There are several virus's that do that I think. When they first started showing up, the word went out to remove format.com from the system. I removed format, fdisk and something else...can't remember, and put them on two backup floppies. Now, if I were to happen up on that virii...it couldn't do its dirty work, cuz there is not a copy of format on my nachine...

Sorry, I can't remember the name, but you can find it at Symantic or McAffee's web sites.

[BBA]

Thats not abnormal in msdos.sys. If it had said "format c: /U" then I would be worried about a virus.

You may have had a boot sector virus, or even a failing drive.... simply typing fdisk/mbr from a floppy boot would have let you boot to windows and repair the damage.

[This message has been edited by BBA (edited 04-15-2001).]

[jray]

The last thing I did before I shut down was update Norton, (prevoiusly had done it last week), and run a full system scan, also ran a scan from a Norton boot disk, which came up clean. The scan from Windows said the boot sector and msdos.sys had changed since innoculation, so after looking at msdos.sys, I chose to repair it. (Mistake?) But also said no virus found...My disk checks out fine...I probably will never know for sure...