Virus in cd-rom?

[Zangrief]

My dad has an old compaq computer (4 years old). And he has been having problems with it. So we got oem windows xp to install on his hdd. When trying to install, it said that files weren't being written properly to the hard drive. I had to leave, but I told him to run scandisk from a win98 boot disk. He claims that when working from the boot disk his comp said he has a virus in his cd-rom. And when he typed "help" at the dos prompt that it displayed a bunch of garbage and not the help file. Has anyone ever heard of virus in cd-rom? About a month ago I ran his compaq diagnostic program and said something about the cd-rom was 50%. I wasn't sure what it was saying maybe 50% effective or something. Now he doesn't an os on his comp and we can't install xp. He is going to try his compac reboot cd and work from there. We formatted the hdd when trying to install xp--can a virus on the hdd survive a format? Maybe by preventing the format from actually taking place?

 

[drag]

Two things, Yes it is possible for a virus to be on a cdrom, however it would had to be put there when it was burned, It won't be able to just 'hop' onto the cdrom just by being read from, since it's a read-only format. So if it is just a OEM or microsoft cd disk 99.5% chance it is clean, but if you got it from warez be carefull.

Plus it is possible for a virus to survive a hdd format. Some virus's will infect the master boot record, which is a small section at your hdd's beginning that is resevred for booting up. It is not reformated by a normal harddrive reformat. If you do have a mbr virus you can get rid of it during on a dos prompt by using: fdisk /mbr

That is a undocumented feature of fdisk that will erase part of the mbr and hopefully any virus residing up in there. Becarefull though, any boot diskette you put into a infected machine may get the virus in it's mbr and can reinfect that computer and spead the virus onto others, but you can avoid that by using a cd disk to boot up with or disposing the floppy diskette after use...

I don't know if it will interfere with a install though. Sounds like either the cdrom drive or the cdrom itself has gone bad, try cleaning cdrom disk with some soapy water and dry with a soft cotton cloth, paper towels will scratch it. Try using a different cd. You probably don't have a virus, better safe than sorry though! Probably scandisk said the cd disk was 50% f#$%-ed up.

 

[Zangrief]

My dad said that fdisk said that his cd player had a virus not the cd. Its actually a dvd player. I wasn't there to confirm what he said, he told me via phone.

But the fdisk utility you told me about could be useful.

I will have to go to his house and see what it really said.

Is it possible for virus to infect a dvd-rom player? Doesn't sound right to me.

Also it was a compaq diagnostic system utility that was saying the dvd player was 50% messed up. Which is where the problem stems from.

I may just have to convince him to let me build him a new system.

 

[Codewiz]

Originally posted by: Zangrief
My dad said that fdisk said that his cd player had a virus not the cd. Its actually a dvd player. I wasn't there to confirm what he said, he told me via phone.

But the fdisk utility you told me about could be useful.

I will have to go to his house and see what it really said.

Is it possible for virus to infect a dvd-rom player? Doesn't sound right to me.

Also the it was a compaq diagnostic system utility that was saying the dvd player was 50% messed up. Which is where the problem stems from.

I may just have to convince him to let me build him a new system.

The physical hardware is not going to have a virus.

 

[Zangrief]

I didnt think it could. Plus it is authentic oem version of xp.

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Try another CD-drive or DVD-drive and see if that helps..

 

[cleverhandle]

Sounds like it's the BIOS, not fdisk, complaining. Sure you don't have an "anti-virus" BIOS option set? That's designed to prevent exactly the type of virus discussed above, and will prevent fdisk'ing as a consequence.

 

[Zangrief]

My dad was mistaken. We used nfts file format and he was using windows 98 boot disk which doesnt recognize that file format. So it was saying there was maybe a virus on c drive. He misunderstood. So i reformated with FAT and now running scandisk which said it found some errors on drive and is checking the surface, taking couple of hours. Hopefully XP will work then. Thanks.