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How do I remove a boot virus?

steve

8:54 am on Mar 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I gave my father in law who is 80, one of our old computers. He has a great time surfing, downloading software and reading emails from pretty Russian brides who want to marry him!

Unfortunately I'm his unpaid IT man, who is always on call to remove viruses! Today he has me stumped.

His computer forgot it had a HDD and CD, when I corrected this the BIOS announced it had found a boot virus.

So using a DOS disk, I reformatted the HDD and tried again, no luck the virus was still there.

I also tried using fdisk to delete and make a new partion which I reformatted, which didn't work.

And tried using 'fdisk /mbr' which is supposed to rewrite the master boot record, again no good.

Finally I downloaded a utilities disk from the HDD manufacturers site, which has a program to wipe the drive - didn't work.

Does anyone know of some software which will wipe the whole disk including the boot sector?

If I fit a new HDD, is it possible the virus is in the BIOS, in which case it will infect the new drive?

kaled

12:02 pm on Mar 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

If FDisk.exe /mbr didn't fix it, I'd say the bios is incorrectly identifying a virus where there is none (unless FDisk.exe is itself corrupted).

1) Disable this feature in the bios.
2) Reinstall Windows and run an AV sweep with something like AVG.

Kaled.

steve

12:39 pm on Mar 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Hi Kaled,

I tried disabling the BIOS anti-virus. Windows (XP and 2000) then crashes during installation.

I've just downloaded and run deban. It runs from its own boot CD, which includes a linux kernel, and erases the drive to DOD standard. Even this crashes reporting it can't access interrupt 13h.

I'm now wondering whether the mobo is faulty, the drive is only 3 months old, so thats probably OK, but the mobo is at least 7 years old.

kaled

4:43 pm on Mar 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

In that case, download a fresh bios image and reflash it. If that also fails, then, yes, I would agree that a motherboard/cpu failure is likely.

When reflashing a bios, be certain you get the right one and follow the instructions carefully.

Kaled.

inveni0

4:15 pm on Mar 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

It's not uncommon for a hard drive to fail after three months as that seems to be the most inconvenient time. (Just after you've got everything you want installed and running, but just before it's too cluttered to need a good sweeping!)

Try a new/different hard drive. If you have two HDD installed, unplug one and use the other, then switch. It's easier to detect a HDD failure than a MB failure.