Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 01:05:09 PDT
From: "neil barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: ZFLinux's MachZ super low power x86 system on a chip
Chris,
Strange you should ask...I can't confirm the virus but to my great annoyance
I appear to have one of the dead machines working again - though how
securely I don't know.
<long_and_boring_story>
It happened that I replaced daughter's 486 laptop with a desktop and that
freed up an original toshiba 800M disk which been replaced with a 3.2G some
time ago. On the off chance last week I stuck that in one of the dead libs
and reloaded the bios (six attempts before it stuck!) and the crazy machine
booted.
That was running a generic W95b (the one that had been in daughter's
machine, no toshiba specials or power management) in 4-bit vga mode only -
so I had another look at the 3.2g drive last night.
That drive turned out to have a very dubious boot sector with suspicious
code in sectors 2 and following which I never finished disassembling...what
I did get was almost standard boot code but not quite...and it was
definitely longer than the 256 bytes it's supposed to be.
So I hit it with a linux fdisk to make
o 800M dos fat32
o 96M linux swap
o 2G linux root
o 64M unallocated for hibernation
set the first partition active (which dos will only let you do on the C
drive, and I had this as E), and then tried to talk to it in dos. Dos fdisk
agreed with the linux fdisk results, so I tried to format it...which dos
promptly did - but to the full 3.2G. I have no idea how it managed to put
3.2G on an 800M partition but I guess that's dos for you. So I removed the
partition with dos fdisk, recreated it again (and naturally it came to the
original 800M), switched to linux fdisk to set the boot flag, came back to
dos to format it with a system.
Finally, I ended up with a copy of command.com and 800M space, copied a
Mandrake 6.1 install CD onto the dos partition, and stuffed the whole lot in
the lib. Which of course failed to boot. Damn.
However, the machine would still boot and go to the bios with the 800M disk
in, so I did that, told it it had a standard IDE - which *never* works -
restarted again telling it to have enhanced IDE, then swapped the disks over
and lo and behold I got a dos boot.
Next step: install the linux. This took a total of three goes as although it
appeared to work ok, the format was unhappy and it couldn't get past the
disk mount stage of the first linux boot. Eventually though, I formatted the
linux sector with surface check and that seems to have done it...it's been
running linux with kde on the matrix screen saver all night, been shut down
and restarted a couple of times and fingers crossed it seems happy.
</long and boring story>
If only I knew what the original problem was...I have strong suspicions that
the original virus or whatever has trashed the video bios...anyone know if
that is replaced when the bios is updated?
Also curious - neither of my virus checkers could find a virus on the disk
but I wonder if they only check for boot viruses on the c: drive?
Whatever, I'll keep you posted as things progress.
Cheers,
Neil (who thought he knew about computers)
>From: Christian Kuiphoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: Libretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: Libretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: ZFLinux's MachZ super low power x86 system on a chip
>Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 09:12:28 -0700
>
>Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 09:06:48 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Christian Kuiphoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: ZFLinux's MachZ super low power x86 system on a chip
>
>Neil,
>
>Did you ever find out what virus that was?
>
>Chris
>
>--- neil barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 06:15:18 PDT
> > From: "neil barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Subject: Re: ZFLinux's MachZ super low power x86
> > system on a chip
> >
> > True...but it has pretty much *everything* all in
> > one package. And as I've
> > just spent weeks trying to sort out a particularly
> > nasty virus infection
> > with a predilection for erasing bios code, I rather
> > like the idea of a
> > read-only copy of the bios and OS built in at
> > manufacture.
> > But the transmeta does have rather nice power
> > handling capabilities.
> >
> > Neil
>
>
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