[NBLUG/talk] Boot virus in Debian 3.0r1?

ME dugan at passwall.com
Thu Aug 21 17:15:01 PDT 2003


Lincoln Peters said:
> I just tried to switch from RedHat 9 to Debian 3.0r1, and when I rebooted,
> I
> got a BIOS warning that indicates that a boot virus in on my hard disk!
> However, it gives no indication of what kind of virus I'm dealing with,
> and
> for all I know, it might just think that there is a virus because I
> re-installed LILO!
>
> Has anyone else experienced such a thing when installing Debian?  Any
> ideas
> of what to do?

Many older BIOS (and possibly newer ones (?)) had a feature to check to
see if the MBR is modified between boots. The idea (was) to permit
identification of boot sector and MBR viruses, since nearly everyone uses
DOS, or Windows (right? ;-).

It was a feature added to machines. Check your BIOS settings and I bet
there is a feature for checking for boot sector viruses. It most likely
just triggered a false positive for LILO installing a new MBR...

-ME




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