Virus affecting HDDs I have a Pentium///500 running Windows98SE 260 MBRAM. In February I had: one IBM 20GB HDD One WD 20GB HDD One MAXtor 40GB HDD An ATA PCI card for Large disk support. As I have ADSL modem I run Tiny Firewall and Grisoft Antivirus programmes always. Despite these precautions I was his with a virus which within a few seconds all data on all drives was corrupted and the boot records corrupted. Also my network card was destroyed. The virus ad a prefix name of BRAZIL I searched Grisoft database without success. The effect of the virus on booting machine was to display a screen warning of a violation of licence and that Windows licence was revoked. No keyboard input was permitted and I had to phisically turn off the machine and enter BIOS to discover the loss of OS and data. I contacted Microsoft support who said this was nothing to do with them and it was a virus. I bought a new 80GB Maxtor drive, partitioned it into four and installed my old OS. I then tried to recover my old HDD's by formatting and re-partioning. This wasn't too successful as some of the sizes of disks were mis-reported. Put in new Network card (D-Lynk530TX) After I had got the system up and running again taking nearly two months to restore software and data from CD back-ups the machine went belly up again with the same problem. All HDD's useless. Pause for blue words and depression. I took all the HDD's and ATA card out leaving only the original 20GB IBM disk. After reformatting thisand trying to restore the MBR, only 16GB is recognised. Nomatter what I do in FDisk, the size is only 16GB. OK, I can live with that for now. However the next 20GB WD drive will only show 1.9GB How can I restore the drives to use their full size? My thoughts are to buy another motherboard/PC but it hurts. Help Please! Tony Dickins tonydickins@art-and-images.co.uk www.art-and-images.co.uk

Go back to your post in the hard ware forum... http://computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/10740.html

Opasoft.a a variant of opaserv. trend micro info http://www.trendmicro.com/ftp/products/tsc/sysclean.com run sysclean.com from trend micro to clean.

www, sir, Thank you for your input. I have downloaded the file and will run this tomorrow. Meanwhile I have installed Bitdefender and ran a scan on the system and it appears clean. Best wishes, TD myself@tonydickins.co.uk www.art-and-images.co.uk

This may be a BIOS virus. I work for a computer company, and we get a lot of that from our customers. Try to physically reset the BIOS. There should be a jumper on the motherboard which does just that. three pins and two of them connected with a jumper. With the computer turned off, remove the jumper, connect the other two pins, leave the jumper for about 10 secconds, and then put it back in the original position. this would work better if you had the manual for your motherboard. if there isn't any jumper there, simply remove the battery that keeps the bios alive, start the computer without it, enter BIOS, play arround, turn it off, put battery back, start computer, Good Luck! Warning! pretty dangerous the jumper thing. Be careful not to get the jumper wrong, or you may burn your pc to dust.