Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 17:18:58 +0000 From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] OT: VAIO PCG-505F notebook system restoration
From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Otherwise perhaps it's a virus of some sort? (ironic given he was doing virus updates!) - I can't remember the name of it but there is one that corrupts the first part of the hard drive, killing the partition table (amongst other things) - I had to help a friend recover from one of those years ago.
Probably "Chernobyl", or otherwise known as W95.CIH.... From the Symantec wesbite:
---------------------------- http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/cih.html
"It can overwrite critical data areas in the first 2,048 sectors of your hard disk. If this happens, you will see a "non-system disk" when the computer boots from the hard drive, or an "invalid media" message when you try to boot from a system floppy disk or from a Rescue disk. To recover using Norton Utilities:
If you have the current Norton Utilities (NU) or Norton AntiVirus Rescue disks, use them to restore the Partition and Boot Record information, and then run Norton Utilities Unformat."
----------------------------
Cute, eh? I may not be able to recover anything with one of those rescue disks, as I ran FDISK /MBR which resulted in a 2nd small partition of a few MBs being created at the end of the ~4GB partition on the drive. Hmmm.... ya know... At this point I don't remember whether or not I tried rebooting at that point... I must have. But I can frequently overlook the obvious.
This all makes sense through, as my friend had just put the notebook on broadband, and used it for a day or so before I was able to warn him that because he had no firewall, no antivirus that was up to date (the McAfee subscription ended years back), and Windows 98 not updated, he was at high risk of being whacked on broadband. :-/
Matt
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