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IBM XT 5160 Infected with the 'Stoned' Virus

M

Malc

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I've been pulling my hair out over the last couple of days trying to find out why my XT 5160 started playing silly buggers with floppy disk's, To cut a long story short it got infected with the 'Stoned' Virus, My own fault, I should have been more careful when re-using old floppy disk's and i should have picked up on it sooner as MSD reported 638k memory instead of the normal 640k.

To make things worse I've infected a couple of old laptops too, So got some cleaning to do and find the source of the virus, A real pain in the arse but looking on the bright side i found an unopened copy of CP anti-virus for dos which i will now be making use of.
 
That brings back memories. I used to work in the public computer lab at a college and the variety of viruses was staggering. I had a pretty good collection too at the time. That was popular along with the "ping pong" virus. I used to use Norton Utilities to clean those (manually) because many would make a copy of the boot sector somewhere else. You simply copied it back to the original boot sector and it was gone (if I remember correctly).
 
Too bad. I ran across infected floppy too, but fortunately I was copying it over ftp to Windows box and antivirus detected it. So no damage that time.
 
I had the "Stoned" virus get loose in my collection a couple of years ago from an infected hard drive I had bought on eBay. I ended up spreading the thing pretty wide across my collection before I realized what was going on. I first used an old copy of Norton running on a Win98 tweener with a 360K drive attached, but this was too slow. I ended up using an old DOS Mcafee scanner. It took weeks, but I went though all of my old disks and finally got it wiped out. I learned to check the old hard drives for infection as soon as I get them. At some point later I bought an old IDE drive that was packed with many virus'. It looked deliberate to me.
 
fatwizard said:
I had the "Stoned" virus get loose in my collection a couple of years ago from an infected hard drive I had bought on eBay. I ended up spreading the thing pretty wide across my collection before I realized what was going on. I first used an old copy of Norton running on a Win98 tweener with a 360K drive attached, but this was too slow. I ended up using an old DOS Mcafee scanner. It took weeks, but I went though all of my old disks and finally got it wiped out. I learned to check the old hard drives for infection as soon as I get them. At some point later I bought an old IDE drive that was packed with many virus'. It looked deliberate to me.
Click to expand...

So, what method did you use to get rid of it?
 
I've done quite a bit of data transfer from old PC 5.25" floppies and run across Stoned-infected ones regularly. Fortunately, customers are only interested in file data, not what's in the boot sector. That thing certainly got around a lot!
 
I have Mcafee95 DOS scanner, the dat file is dated 1996. I loaded it on my 5160 and scanned every 5.25" 360K disk I owned. Norton 2000 on the Win98 tweener worked, but I'm too old to have done it that way. I wouldn't have lived long enough to finish. The DOS scanner method was MUCH quicker, and it did the job, at least on the variety of "Stoned" I had running around here. I found the scanner in my stuff, but will happily share it if anyone needs.
 
Along the same thread - anyone know of an archive for DAT files either for McAfee or for updates to Norton? I figure if I can get the last DOS version up and running my vintage collection should be relatively secure!
 
I got that one when I had my amstrad pc back in the days, it was pain in the neck to remove
 
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