[NBLUG/talk] Looking for a bootable disk editor

Jippen cheetahmorph at gmail.com
Tue Oct 14 02:05:30 PDT 2008


I'd recommend googling for hex editors. Point a hex editor at a drive,
and you can work on all the data on the drive manually.

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Bruce Schadel <schadel at sonic.net> wrote:
> I'm not a sysadmin of any denomination and have no business on this list
> but I've been lurking ever since an installfest a few years ago.
>
> I work in a semiconductor fab and have engineering responsibility for an
> instrument with a built-in and not upgradeable, hardwarewise, PC
> controller. Someone on the previous watch had managed to migrate from
> Windows 3.11 to Windows 98. I sent the instrument out for repair about 6
> months ago and it came back with 3.11 again. Some calibration function
> didn't work under '98. But, it now has the NYB boot-sector virus. By all
> accounts, this beastie is pretty benign, seeking mainly to replicate and
> spread itself. However, the application is crashing regularly and it
> seems the first thing to do is get rid of the virus.
>
> I did a web search and some sources suggest I just run FDISK /MBR to
> rewrite the master boot record. Another source says the virus/worm will
> have copied absolute sector 1 to sector 17. It's not clear whether the
> bug will have overwritten the partition table at the end of sector 1. If
> it has, restoring the MBR only will render the PC unbootable.
>
> So, I'm looking for a bootable disk editor, preferably free, that will
> allow me to inspect sectors 1 and 17 and copy portions of one to the
> other if need be. I thought I'd find an open-source utility to do that,
> but no joy. I downloaded the trial version of Acronis Disk Director
> Suite 10.0 which contains 'way more than I want but it appears that the
> disk editor component is read-only.
>
> Any ideas? I can boot from a floppy or CD.
>
> BTW, the guy who gave me the virus left the company he was working for
> shortly afterward.
>
> Thanks,
> --Bruce--
>
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