woody@praxis.co.uk (Paul Woodman) (02/28/91)
This subject may have been covered here before, but viewers may
be interested in the virus that came with my new Rodime disk.
Last week I took delivery (in the UK) of a Rodime 45 plus drive
for my Mac. It was supplied in an unopened Rodime carton so I
presume, but can't be sure, that nobody has had their fingers in
it since it left the factory. The drive comes with a 3.5' floppy
called PLUS/RX utilities for the Macintosh.
It is a nice touch by Rodime that the drive is supplied already
formatted complete with System 6.0.4 installed so you are ready
to plug in and go. However, as the accompanying documentation
points out, it would be a good idea to reformat/partition your
disk etc with the utilities provided on the floppy. So I did,
and they were very nice utilities that left me with a reformated
disk waiting for me to load with my appropriate software
environment. In fact the utilities were so nice that I inserted
the floppy in another Mac to see if they would work with a
different Rodime drive.
As I inserted the floppy, good old disinfectant 2.4 complained
the floppy was infected with WDEF A. I then went back to my
newly formatted 45 plus with a clean write protected copy of
disinfectant and sure enough, the hard drive was infected.
(I must make clear that this was a diskless Mac Plus that I
connected the Rodime drive to. At the time of connection it
was switched off, had no other external hardware attached and
on subsequent power up, no external hardware was attached and
the only floppy inserted in the internal drive was the Rodime
utilities followed by the disinfectant floppy AFTER I had
discovered the virus.)
I called the Rodime UK technical support number as listed in the
manual and discovered it was the number of their Fax machine.
When I finally got through to their UK technical support, they
appologised, but didnt seem in the slightest bit concerned to
the extent that they didnt even want to take my name or contact
details or have the offending floppy back. They also confirmed
that the utilities floppies are not delivered shrink wrapped
so there is no security involved.
In conclusion, I dont know enough about viruses to be sure of
where this one got in. However I can be 100% sure it wasnt on
this site, as far as I can tell from the packaging, nobody has
opened the box since it left Rodime and the dealer confirms that
he didnt open the box. When you consider the damage that could
have been caused if trusty disinfectant hadn't come to my rescue,
then Rodimes response is incredibly poor, even if they aren't
responsible for the appearance of this virus on my disk. The
UK price is $900 and for that price, I expect better.
Rodime told me that they no longer make this model in the UK but
import it from Rodime in the US. I wonder if anybody else has
discovered this problem with Rodime ?
Paul Woodman
Praxis plc, Software Engineers,
\ / | 20 Manvers Street, Bath, BA1 1PX, UK.
\ / ___ ___ _| Tel +44 225 444700 xt228
\ /\ / / / / / / | \ / Fax +44 225 465205, Telex 445848
\/ \/ /__/ /__/ /__| \/ woody@praxis.co.uk
_________________________/CAH0@gte.com (Chuck Hoffman) (03/06/91)
woody@praxis.co.uk (Paul Woodman) writes: > When you consider the damage that could > have been caused if trusty disinfectant hadn't come to my rescue (...) I agree with all of Paul's points except this one. WDEF probably would not have caused any great damage, but it can be a pain to get rid of. (Pardon my grammar.) - - Chuck Hoffman, GTE Laboratories, Inc. | I'm not sure why we're here, cah0@bunny.gte.com | but I am sure that while we're Telephone (U.S.A.) 617-466-2131 | here, we're supposed to help GTE VoiceNet: 679-2131 | each other. GTE Telemail: C.HOFFMAN |