BARNOLD@YKTVMH.BITNET (06/14/91)
Readers might want to play with an undocumented /MBR switch in DOS 5 FDISK. It appears to force FDISK to overwrite the code in a PC/PS2 master boot record, without touching the partition table, and in limited testing on a half dozen machines it succeeded in cleaning up machines infected with the Stoned, the Stoned 2, and the Joshi viruses. This was with the DOS 5 shipped by IBM, not Microsoft's DOS 5; can somebody please test MS-DOS 5? The Joshi can't be removed this way unless it isn't active in memory. (e.g. cold boot from a write protected, uninfected bootable DOS 5 disk with a copy of FDISK on it.) The command line syntax tested was FDISK /MBR Bill Arnold barnold@watson.ibm.com