Hard drive mysteriously wiped clean!

[Nick66]

While running Win98 system locks up and wipes out everything except for WINDOWS\DESKTOP dir. Has happend twice. System has cable net access. Virus?..Intruder?

Anybody ever hear of such cruelty? http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

=Nick=

[jlewis]

Freaky!!!...I say virus, never heard of that before.

[Nick66]

Have tried latest ver of Mcafee & Norton....Nada.

[Mntsnow]

Is the system Overclocked? If not and with you saying that it has happened twice and the only thing left is the windows/desktop directory I would more than likely say you have gotten your self a virus. (keep in mind the virus might have written itself to the bios, any floppy disk you might have used at ANY time in the machine, could have written itself to the MBR (master boot record) or even written itself to the unconfigured space on the harddrive. (I would find the low level format utility made for your brand of drive and wipe that sucker out! I would also suggest making a clean boot disk from a know UNinfected machine and flash the bios on the infected machine too.

[Nick66]

It is overclocked via ComputerNerd, its one of those Athlon's AMD is so upset about.

K7500@700mhz on Asus K7M

Hardware seems rock solid. Bios virus sounds possible, low level format might be neccesary.
Thanks for the suggestions Mntsnow.

I am interested to see if anyone has heard of a trojan or BackOrifice type of intruder attack with similar results.

[Ilya_S_K]

if you have BO2000 installed on your PC there is a possibility that you have chernobil virus in your system (read it on there site that one of their versions of Back Orifice was infected). What chernobil virus does? it wipes out your HD clean. but it only activates itself on the anniversary of Chernobil. Which is sometime in July as I remember correct. So, if you have your system clock set back, as I do 6 or 8 months. There is something for you to think about. . .

[GarthLear]

You're not alone. Thanks Mntsnow for the comments about the hard drive as it might explain what happened to my sons machine. He was downloading when it started acting up and then couldn't get it to boot. The drive had been totally wiped clean and I chalked it up as some kind of virsus. Reinstalled Win98 but was not right, kept locking up. Finally put a different drive in it and now its fine. It is a cel300 running at 450 but no trouble before or since. I was going to add drive in other machine as second drive but still seems unstable so I will low level format and see if that fixes.

[Nick66]

Problem has been resolved(=JOY=) http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Issue was with MB bios power management & suspend functions.

Thanks to all who repiled

*-!Nick!-*