achilles@alphalpha.com (David Holland) (09/19/90)
Recently a Mac which I am basically responsible for the general health of (it
is the office computer in the fine arts department at my high school) has come
down with some strange symptoms.
A week or so ago I installed some new stuff, mostly PD and shareware picked
up from a friend. All of these were things he had used on his system for the
last several months without any problem.
Well, problems cropped up immediately. Soundmaster installed and ran
perfectly - except it adamantly refused to play anything on startup. All the
other options worked fine.
The more puzzling thing is that Disinfectant, when run, produced a bomb box.
The error ID was consistently 03, which, according to the table of system
errors I have, is a bad instruction. This happened consistently, regardless of
removing INITs and desk accessories and everything else I could think of.
At first I thought it was probably an incompatibility with the System, which
was only version 6.0; I said I'd see if I could get hold of an update, and
left it at that.
But yesterday, Microsoft Works data files started refusing to automatically
load Works when opened from the Finder, much to the confusion of the music
teachers. It turned out that Works itself ran fine and the documents could be
loaded fine from within it (fortunately) - but something was rather amiss.
I ran Disinfectant from the floppy disk I'd copied it from my friend on;
somewhat to my surprise, it ran properly. A scan of the hard disk uncovered no
viruses, but did determine that the hard disk copy of Disinfectant had a
damaged resource fork. All very well: throw out that copy and make a fresh one
from the floppy. Done. Guess what: the problem recurred - without, indeed,
running anything else in the meantime.
Today I further discovered that when I duplicated Disinfectant on a floppy,
renamed it "fubar", and copied both to the hard disk, one worked and the other
didn't... and that Apple's disk-doctor program did NOT work from the original
system-utilities disk (write-protected, of course) though it DID when copied
to the hard disk. (It generated a bomb box with an error 02 - illegal
address.)
The system in question is a rather vanilla Mac SE - 20 meg HD, 720K floppy,
1 meg memory, no particular expansions. System version 6.0.
The version of Disinfectant I have is 1.7; I know that's not the highest, but
the computer isn't connected to anything and getting stuff is extremely
difficult. :(
My apologies for the excessive length, but since I really don't know a thing
about the inner workings of Macs I thought I'd better add everything in case
someone who does know can help.
The obvious question, of course: does this look like any particular known
virus? It's not impossible that the whole thing is a symptom of a decaying
hard drive, or something, after all...
Disinfectant didn't detect anything, and I don't think Gatekeeper has; but
whatever it is, if it is a virus, could be able to go around them. I tried to
borrow a copy of SAM-Intercept from someone to check further, but it decided I
was violating its copyright and wouldn't let me.
Thanks...
David A. Holland
Internet: pro-angmar!achilles@alphalpha.com | There is no great
aeneas@blade.mind.org (slower) | talent without a
Citadel: blade!aeneas@{undermind, overmind} | mixture of madness.
Fidonet: David Holland @ 1:322/337 (not preferred) | -Senecarubinoff@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Robert Rubinoff) (09/21/90)
[description of symptoms deleted] System 6.0 is full of bugs! Do not use it! (I think some of the bugs can even damage files.) There was a whole lot of commotion when 6.0 came out because it had so many problems. You should use System 6.0.2 or higher. Robert