On Oct 18, 11:50*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:
On Oct 18, 11:16*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:



On Oct 17, 11:42*am, wrote:

On Oct 17, 6:45*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:
* On Oct 16, 8:22*pm, "William Sommerwerck"
* wrote:

*
* I was going to keep my nose out of this, but I'm so thoroughly
confused that
* I have to butt in.
* What are you trying to do? Test the drives? If so, this seems
about the
* worst possible way. It would make more sense to set these drives
as slaves
* and boot them on a known-good computer (as someone else
suggested). Even
* better, if they're IDE-ATA drives, you can mount them in a box
with a USB
* interface, and simply attach them to a running machine.
*
* What is the question you're asking? I suspect it's the wrong one.
*
* William
* Thank you for "butting in". I appreciate everyone's input, yours
* included. I thought that I was being very concise. However I have
to
* ask seriously did you read the OP? And if I did follow what you
just
* suggested how would that have prevented a CMOS virus, if that's
what
* this problem is? But to address another question I have why would
* these engineers in their infinite wisdom write a bios to anything
* other than a non writable eprom. It would seem like some things
should
* be sacred. Lenny

What William suggests is something I and many others have done many
times without problems. I saw a computer (not mine) that was so
infected the processor was 100% busy and would do nothing useful,
including running a virus scan. Of course they needed to salvage the
apps and data and couldn't just re-format and start over. The drive
was first slaved into a good machine and subjected to a virus scan.
Remember those pesky viruses have to execute to become active. The
slave drive executes nothing during boot so activates nothing (unless
the boot drive has its own viruses). That's when I became convinced
about Norton utilities. Norton wouldn't dump a virus because it was
running. AHAH, I'll boot into safe mode and kill it before it's
running. Norton (at least that version) will not run in safe mode. I
don't have Norton.

As far as booting from unknown drives, I wouldn't even attempt that.
The OS installation gets tweaked during install for the hardware on
the machine. Who knows what the original hardware was?

I also had a machine with a BIOS bug that was fixed with an update. It
was FLASH so I didn't have to get a new BIOS chip and install it
though one time I didn't follow the procedure EXACTLY and corrupted
the BIOS. That machine was old enough to still have a socketed chip
and it 'only' took $30 and a few days wait. My current Gigabyte boards
all have dual flash BIOS chips. If you foul up a BIOS update (and I
did THAT once too) it defaults back to the known good one and boots
back up and yes, you can copy the current BIOS to the backup. The
Gigabyte boards will now update the BIOS online while running Windows..
That is about the easiest. I would think that a BIOS virus would be
harder to write as it would be specific to a board model. Or do all
the BIOS writes behave identically?

G²

I noticed something else now. If I leave the computer off for example
overnight, the next day it will let me get into bios only once. I can
change things and exit and it appears to save the changes. However on
the next attempt to access bios, hitting DEL during the period where
the RAM is counting up will not get me into bios again. It just gives
me a black screen. This "once only" thing has repeated several times
with the same end result. And my changes aren't appearing to work
either. Tthe last time I did this I changed the boot sequence to
floppy then IDE0 and I enabled floppy drive seek. When I exited and
saved, it did seem to do those things, and then on subsequent attempts
it just goes to a black screen again. So it does appear that the bios
is screwed up somehow. Now here is another interesting thing. The
working computer I have with all my important customer files seems to
have the same bios chip in it. Both chips have a yellow and blue label
that covers about 2/3 of the top of *the chip. The label reads: BURN-
IN and under that: 24HRS. There is a smaller white label on the other
side of the top of each chip. The chips read as follows:

Possible corrupted chip:
Chip in working computer:
AMIBIOS
AMIBIOS
586
1985-95
586 1985-95
American
American
Megatrends
Megatrends
D167887
D174223

If I had to guess I would say that these bios's are identical, however
I don't dare *mess with that good one. Does anyone have any
suggestions or perhaps if there was a way to copy the good bios to my
bad machine? I don't know how I would ever install it though. I just
don't want to do anything that could possibly harm my good machine.
Thanks, Lenny

This didn't display as I thought it would. This is how the two chips
should look:

Possible corrupted chip:

AMIBIOS
586 1985-95
American
Megatrends
D167887

Chip in working computer:
AMIBIOS
586 1985-95
American
Megatrends
D174223

Sorry but the system formatted my script. Thanks Lenny

I just found a third machine sitting here with no hardware in it. It
also has an AMI bios chip in it The chip has similar markings, (date
etc), no blue and yellow label but it bears the number EO56165. Does
anyone know what the differences if any might be in these three bios's
and if perhaps they might be interchangeable? Lenny