[aclug-L] Re: disk-management software .. Viruses?

[Jeff Vian <jvian10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Carmichael wrote:
> |    I am willing to bet a moderate sum of money that
> |    there was in-fact no virus on the old hard disk, or
> |    at least on the MBR.  This sounds an awful lot like
> |    there was some type of disk-management software
> |    like (Western Digital's OnTrack or Maxtor's
> |    MaxBlast) written into the MBR.  This software
> |    commonly comes with hard drives so that one can
> |    get around certain types of BIOS <-> HD size barriers
> 
> Wouldn't this show up when booted from the drive in question?
> 

I did not think of this myself since it has been a long time since I ran 
into this problem.

However, it may not work or even show up as anything except errors on a 
system that uses the drive in native mode.  The C-H-S mapping could 
easily prevent the drive manager from even starting.  Systems that use 
LBA addressing often can't even load the drive manager because sector 
sizes are different and cylinder boundaries are way off. -- Thus sector 
0 is even a different size and the boot record may appear invalid. Or it 
is valid, but the manager may not function properly because of the 
changes in the hardware/bios on the new system.
I have even seen it where forcing the bios to NOT use LBA would allow 
the drive manager to function, but LBA caused the errors.

Newer system boards probably have a bios that does not allow a choice of 
LBA or normal mode.

I had a drive in an early 486 that I migrated to a pentium and when I 
did I had to wipe the drive manager using the "fdisk /mbr" trick to 
remove the software that was trying to make it think the drive was 
differrent than it actually was. Then a new fdisk and a new format and 
the drive was fine

AFAIK the bios inability to support the newer larger drives was the 
cause of needing the drivbe amanagers to fool the bios into believing 
the drive was physically smaller than it actually was by using the faked 
mapping of the manager. Then the changes in bios to support larger 
drives made the managers obssolete for the newer systems and often meant 
the drives had to be repartitioned after moving them to a system that 
did not need the manager to see the full drive size.


> I have seen this software loaded on older computers and it always (in the
> past) has a 'title' screen display durring the boot-up of the system?
> 
> --David
> 
> 
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