I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

"Lenny" wrote in message
m...
| I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
| having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
| boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
| Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
| customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
| I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
| to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
| machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

AVG will create a boot floppy with a virus test and it's free.

http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php

N

"Lenny" wrote in message
m...
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

How would a virus get on the machine in the first place? Obviously it's not
on the internet, and if it's just for billing it seems unlikely contaminated
disks would get in there.

Lenny wrote:
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

I tend to agree with James, but since any anti virus program that could
be contained on one floppy would necessarily be very limited, I would
remove the HD and attach it to a system as a slave drive. After having
done so, I would run the A/V program on this system and direct it to
scan the slave drive. The new system would undoubtedly have more
complete virus definitions and if there was a virus is more likely to
detect and remove it.

That being said, your symptoms sound an awful lot like a HD about to fail.

Hello,

Take a look at FPROT.

http://www.f-prot.com/index.html

Kris.

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 06:05:37 GMT, "James Sweet"
said to us:


"Lenny" wrote in message
om...
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

How would a virus get on the machine in the first place? Obviously it's not
on the internet, and if it's just for billing it seems unlikely contaminated
disks would get in there.

If this machine is not on the net, or used for running any external
softwares, I would be inclined to believe that the hard drive is failing
from age and use...

--

Jerry G.
==========================


"Lenny" wrote in message
m...
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Boot the hard drive up on a HD diagnostics disk, such as
SpinRite by Gibson Research Corporation (www.grc.com) and
test the drive for physical integrity. This is probably a
very old drive, on a definitely very old machine. Your drive
had a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of less than 5 years of
continuous operation, and you have likely tripled that time.

-Chuck Harris

Lenny wrote:
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

On 16 Oct 2004 22:41:01 -0700, (Lenny)
wrote:

I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Lenny...it's probably a HDD on the way down.

Tom

Well we have alot of old floppies floating around here that have
questionable data on them. They get plugged into machines sometimes
and its entirely conceivable that some unknown stuff could be spread
around this way. Whether a Windows based virus would affect a Dos
machine, I don't know but I suppose anything is possible. I don't want
to take the magnetron magnet to them until I know whats on them. And
if I could scan them first that would be great. Lenny.

"James Sweet" wrote in message news:RYncd.5464$232.2958@trnddc09...
"Lenny" wrote in message
m...
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

How would a virus get on the machine in the first place? Obviously it's not
on the internet, and if it's just for billing it seems unlikely contaminated
disks would get in there.

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 12:52:48 GMT Ken wrote:

Lenny wrote:
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

I tend to agree with James, but since any anti virus program that could
be contained on one floppy would necessarily be very limited, I would
remove the HD and attach it to a system as a slave drive. After having
done so, I would run the A/V program on this system and direct it to
scan the slave drive. The new system would undoubtedly have more
complete virus definitions and if there was a virus is more likely to
detect and remove it.

That being said, your symptoms sound an awful lot like a HD about to fail.

I agree with this suggestion, and you could actually do it on your
current system. Just pick up a cheap hard drive somewhere (I have a
525 MB you can HAVE) and reinstall DOS on it. Boot to that drive, with
your old drive mounted as the secondary drive. This way your old drive
will be recognized as the D: drive.

Once you're booted up to the new C: drive, you can examine the old
drive and see if you can read it. If you can, you'd better copy
everything to the C: drive right away.

If you have a newer computer you could certainly install this disk in
it, as a secondary drive and use any more modern OS to try to read and
copy the old drive contents. You can certainly check for viruses this
way, but it sounds like this is a much less likely senario than just a
failing hard drive.

-
-----------------------------------------------
Jim Adney
Madison, WI 53711 USA
-----------------------------------------------

On 17 Oct 2004 08:10:21 -0700, (Lenny)
wrote:

Well we have alot of old floppies floating around here that have
questionable data on them. They get plugged into machines sometimes
and its entirely conceivable that some unknown stuff could be spread
around this way. Whether a Windows based virus would affect a Dos
machine, I don't know but I suppose anything is possible. I don't want
to take the magnetron magnet to them until I know whats on them. And
if I could scan them first that would be great. Lenny.

Have you had luck with a magnetron magnet? I tried that, and an
external degaussing coil, on a few floppies, and they were very
resilient.

Tom


"James Sweet" wrote in message news:RYncd.5464$232.2958@trnddc09...
"Lenny" wrote in message
m...
I'm running a 386/25 with Dos 6.2 for billing. Recently it has been
having problems with bad sectors on the drive showing, and refusing to
boot unless you boot off a floppy and do a sys c: from the A drive.
Now it will not boot from the hard drive at all. Luckily I copied my
customer files before this happened. But there is alot of other stuff
I would like to get off it. To rule out a virus problem is there an up
to date scan program I can get that will run from a floppy on a Dos
machine? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

How would a virus get on the machine in the first place? Obviously it's not
on the internet, and if it's just for billing it seems unlikely contaminated
disks would get in there.

"Tom MacIntyre" wrote in message
...

| Have you had luck with a magnetron magnet? I tried that, and an
| external degaussing coil, on a few floppies, and they were very
| resilient.
|
| Tom

Some magnets have a very 'closed' circuit. Old speaker magnets are usually
OK, or even dollar store magnets.

N