14) What other tools might I need? (Computer virus)
Description
This article is from the Computer viruses FAQ, by David Harley D.Harley@icrf.icnet.uk, George Wenzel gwenzel@telusplanet.net and Bruce Burrell bpb@umich.edu with numerous contributions by others.
14) What other tools might I need? (Computer virus)
Other suggestions have included a sector editor, and Norton Utilities
components such as Disk Doctor (NDD). These are not suitable for use by
the technically-challenged - any tool which can manipulate disks at a
low-level is potentially dangerous. If you do use tools like this, make
sure they're good quality and up-to-date. If you attack a 1Gb disk with
a package that thinks 32Mb is the maximum for a partition and MFM disk
controllers are leading edge, you're in for trouble....
A copy of PKZIP/PKUNZIP or similar compression/decompression utility may
be useful both for retrieving data and for cleaning (some) stealth viruses.
The MSD diagnostic tool supplied with recent versions of DOS and Windows
is a useful addition. Heavy duty diagnostic packages like CheckIt! may
be of use. There are some useful shareware/freeware diagnostic packages,
too.
Obviously, these are not all going to go on one bootdisk. When you
prepare a toolkit like this, make sure *all* the disks are
write-protected!
Tech support types are likely to find that an assortment of bootable
disks including various versions of DOS comes in useful on occasion.
If you have one or two non-Microsoft DOS versions (DR-DOS/Novell DOS
or PC-DOS), they can be a useful addition. DoubleSpaced or similar
drives will need DOS 6.x; Stacked drives will need appropriate
drivers loaded.
My understanding of the copyright position is that Microsoft does
not encourage you to *distribute* bootable disks (even if they contain
only enough files to minimally boot the system) *unless* the target
system is loaded with the same version of MS-DOS as the boot floppy.
Support engineers will need to ensure that they are legally entitled
to all DOS versions for which they have bootable disks.
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