On Oct 18, 8:16*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:
On Oct 17, 11:42*am, wrote:
snip
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

Are those motherboards identical including Rev number? If the chips
are socketed I would remove them and read the data of both with a chip
programmer and save the files. Copy the good one into the faulty one
and try again.Vanilla EPROM programmers my not be able to program
FLASH chips.

G²