topic Re: Virus question in Operating System - Microsoft

Virus question

Bernard R. Uphold — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:36:07 GMT

Is it possible to retain a virus on a hard drive after fdisking in win98?

Re: Virus question

John Y — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 21:41:31 GMT

Not to my knowledge no.!

Re: Virus question

Jon Finley — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:45:42 GMT

Shouldn't be able to.... Assuming that you booted up with a Win98 floppy, deleted the partition, rebooted, then Created the new partition.

If you used fdisk from the C: drive after booting to DOS, and you didn't reboot inbetween, it "could" be possible for the virus to be memory resident, and reinfect the MBR.

Jon

Re: Virus question

Bharat Katkar — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 04:08:07 GMT

Hi,
It's not possible. After doing Fdisk, Your FAT is overwritten and everything is lost alongwith the virus. This is the ultimate step to remove the virus if you don't find the antivirus.
Regards,

Re: Virus question

Ronald Postma — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 05:26:31 GMT

Hi Bernard
It is possibel, if you booted with an infected bootdevice to fdisk the partition it can be put back when formating the drive.

I'm not 100% sure, but there are virusses that nestel themselve in the MasterBootRecord(MBR) the MBR is not cleaned if your remove partitions and create them again. With the fdisk /mbr command the MBR is restored to original.

HTH,
Ronald

Re: Virus question

Thomas Bianco — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 07:53:06 GMT

yes, it is posible to retain a virus after FDisk if, as stated above, it's a mbr resident virus. MBR viruses reflect >5% of the viruses in the wild today

however, it's much more likly that you got reinfected from a floppy, or other media.

after a recent battle with one virus or another, i was finding infected files months after i had clean the entire system, some on floppies, CD, my usb key, spare harddrives, Zip disks, you name it.

Re: Virus question

Ken wanderer — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:12:11 GMT

One thing to remember is to check everything that you put into the fresh system. I have had many users put infected disks back into machines that were rebuilt. The computer didn't create the virus, the communication with media or the Internet did. Check all you disks before using them. The problem is people always seem to find an old disk somewhere, and without telling you, load it without checking it. Get a good antivirus and spyware program(s).