85 What is the ChipAway virus? (Or ChipAwayVirus?)
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
85 What is the ChipAway virus? (Or ChipAwayVirus?)
The ChipAway virus is not a virus at all. In fact, it is a poorly
chosen name for a good idea. Many PCs have an advanced BIOS feature
that, when activated, prevents any writes to the MBR through BIOS disk
routines. If active, this feature can cause problems if you install non-
DOS operating systems (like OS/2, Windows 95 or Windows NT), as their
installation routines typically need to write to the MBR, but for
general purpose computers, it is a good idea to turn on these options,
if they exist.
Unfortunately, one of the earliest and most widely available
implementations of this idea prints a message on screen at each system
startup to the effect "ChipAwayVirus installed". This is supposed to
calm the owner's nerves, making them confident that their BIOS antivirus
system is working for them. For fairly obvious reasons, it tends to
have the opposite effect!
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