On Wed, 19 Oct 2016, Sam O'nella wrote:
Does that archive on classiccmp.org have the infected images removed or
cleaned? (Just curious as I remember this came up in a couple other forums
that I think one or two of the images did have a virus).
an 8080/Z80 compatible CP/M virus???
Or are you talking about a virus in some sort of MS-DOS image?
Or an MS-DOS boot sector virus that wrote itself onto the "boot sector" of a
non-MS-DOS format?
OK, answering my own query, I did a trivial amount of GOOGLEing, and found
discussion that said that "Stoned" was found in TD0 images of PC-7000
MS-DOS 2.11.
That is an EXTREMELY common MS-DOS boot sector virus. And was apparently
in an image of an MS-DOS disk. However, some "anti-virus" software would
not find it, since it might ONLY look in the boot sector for that virus,
not within an archive image.
Many other "anti-virus" software will get a lot of false positives, since
it is only looking for a short "signature" - meaning that the staff in the
anti-virus company extracts a short sequence from an infected disk, and
then triggers whenever it encounters that particular sequence of bytes.
Are they skilled enough to extract a significant "signature" that would
only occur in that virus, or do they grab a random sequence within the
infected disk?
In any case, it is NOT likely to be a problem for any sort of Cromemco
disk. And the discussion that GOOGLE turned up was specifically referring
to MS-DOS 2.11 of PC-7000.
Do NOT boot an 80x86 machine from one of those images.
BTW, ANY versions of MS-DOS 2.11 or 3.31 should be saved! Even if it
means manually "disinfecting". Those were the most customized versions of
MS-DOS, and included 3.5" disk formats that were not PC-DOS compatible,
special versions of MODE.COM (for non-80x25 screens, and laptop
externals), etc.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
