Methods to Detect a Boot-Sector Virus

Boot-sector viruses infect computer systems by copying code either to the boot sector on a floppy disk or the partition table on a hard disk. During startup, the virus is loaded into memory. Once in memory, the virus will infect any non-infected disks accessed by the system. Examples of boot- sector viruses are Michelangelo and Stoned.

Boot-sector viruses are spread to computer systems by booting, or attempting to boot, from an infected floppy disk. Even if the disk does not contain the MS-DOS system files needed to successfully boot, an attempt to boot from an infected disk will load the virus into memory. The virus hooks itself into memory as if it were a device driver. The virus moves the Interrupt 12 return, allowing itself to remain in memory even after a warm boot. The virus will then infect the first hard disk in the system.

Because the virus moves the Interrupt 12 return, the MS-DOS system memory will be 2K (2048 bytes) smaller than normal. This can be verified by running the MS-DOS CHKDSK command.

For example, if your system has 640K, CHKDSK will report: If the system is infected with a boot-sector virus, CHKDSK will report: Some systems use 1K (1024 bytes) of memory for the BIOS. Other systems use 2K (2048 bytes) of memory for shadow RAM. You must take this into account before CHKDSK can be used as an accurate measure of whether or not a system is infected with a virus. Please refer to the hardware manufacturer to see if the system uses part of the MS-DOS 640K of memory.

Once a system is infected with a boot-sector virus, any non-write-protected disk accessed by this system will become infected. For example, simply doing a DIR command on a floppy disk will cause the disk to become infected with the virus. Note: MS-DOS version 5.0 disks are shipped without a notch; therefore, they are write-protected. The chances of these disks containing a virus are close to none. The MS-DOS 5.0 disk files are compressed, so the actual file sizes are different. You can determine a compressed file by the underscore character (_) that is the last character of the filename extension. To expand a compressed file, use the EXPAND utility on Disk 5 (5.25-inch disk set) or Disk 3 (3.5-inch disk set).