I just bought a used 386 pc from a yard sale which is working yesterday. I have an old dos version of Norton Antivirus which I installed on the 386. Anyway, I ran Norton & this is what it said, Master boot record of drive 1 is infected by the NYB virus, attemping to repair the infected boot record. This process is non-reversible. Do you wish to continue? I answered yes. About 10 seconds later it said "Unable to repair master boot record. Computer still infected. I searched on the Net & it said do fdisk /mbr. I did and Norton is still saying the virus is there. So I did fdisk, deleted all primary partitians, set active partitian & then formatted & reinstalled dos. Ran Norton. Now says this virus in in memory. Can someone please help me? I know a newer version of Norton would get rid of it because I ran Norton on an infected floppy from my new pc & it got rid of it. But this pc does not have a cd-rom drive. Also when the virus was reported it told me to insert my rescue disk, which I did & my computer restarted. But then Norton refused to load. It will only load from the C: drive. Can someone help me out. I got it for my little boy. Thanks!

Shannon, you may have 'infected' your boot disk (and others!), which would pass the virus back to the new boot sector on your hard drive. If so, you'll need a clean boot disk, but make sure to open up the 'write protect' button on the floppy so that the floppy stays clean (uninfected). In fact, all your important backups, boot disks and rescue disks, anti-virus etc should be protected to prevent this kind of infection. With a clean, write-protected boot disk, you should be able to repair the Master Boot Record (MBR) and remove the virus again. Next it wouldn't hurt to get a more up-to-date antivirus program, perhaps F-PROT, and check your floppies as well.

Thanks for your help. I downloaded F-PROT & when I ran it it said I needed an updated version. It still scanned the pc & reported no viruses. I then downloaded Invircible from www.invircible.com for dos. It reported an error saying "memory stealing detected" & then told me to reboot the computer. After it rebooted it reported, self integrity & decoy test passed master boot record is intact boot sector is intact Validating c:\dos, all files matched their recorded signatures. I also ran chkdsk & it reports 655,360 total bytes memory. I then reinstalled Norton & ran it. Is still telling me "master boot record on drive 1 is infected with the NYB virus" Items scanned C:-D. Master boot records scanned 2, infected 1. I am still confused because I thought the virus scanner I downloaded cleaned it. Is there anyway for sure for me to know this virus is gone? I know eventually If I dont get rid of it I will not be able to access the HD. I also did write protect all floppy disks after scanning them with my new computer.

Boot with a non infected boot disk and issue this command. fdisk /mbr Hopefully that will clean off the virus on the boot record. Hope that helps, -Michael

In the Bios Advanced setup, set the Boot Virus Detection (or similarly named item) to Disabled, see if it irons the problem out. It could be a fault-alarm.

perhaps it's your copy of norton that's infected?

correction : "fault-alarm", I mean "false alarm". Furthermore, chkdsk reports 655,360 Bytes. It could be another indicator of it.