An IBM business partner working with Eduquest equipment told me that they
have discovered a rash of the Form-A virus on local workstations here in
northern Illinois.
This essentially attacks the FAT and you lose hard drive partioning, when it
goes active (it stays dormant for a little while). Now, granted I'm not an
expert at these things, but I've been hearing that people are giving up on
their hard drive and doing a reformat.
We use a product called THE FIX, by Consolidated Software Products, Inc.
(1-800-737-8763). The startup screen says it is free, although you are only
allowed to copy it twice.
We've used it to (1) Diagnose Drive
(2) Choose Repair Boot Sector
(3) Partition Sector
(4) Run Virus cleaning sofware
(5) Reboot
In that order (pull down menus in its program)
The last few times I've done this I've recovered the drive....without erasing
the data.
It's been a year since I've done this, but I believe these were the steps.
Even my vendor was reformating infected drives. Subsequent viruscans have
turned up clean, for a year now on those original computers.
Bruce Carlson
Hononegah High School
Rockton, IL
Hchs207@aol.com