rk39+@andrew.cmu.edu (Robert Joseph Kuszewski) (11/01/90)
O Great New Gurus, I have an interesting problem which I have never seen before, but maybe some of you know what's going on. We have a number of public machines here on campus which have been preidocally erasing floppy disks for no apparent reason. The machines in question are MacII's (with 2meg ram) and MacIIcx's (with 8 meg ram). Both are running system 6.0.3. Here's the scenario as it's been explained to me many, many times in the past few days: A user comes in and sits down at a machine. They insert their disk and open whatever application they want to use (mostly MacWrite II and CricketGraph). They finish what they are doing and save their work. They then quit back to the finder (I don't know if they were using multifinder or not) and one of several things happens: 1. The standard "This disk is unreadable" error comes up. 2. All but one or two files on the disk are erased. 3. The desktop gets fried (but the files can be recovered using Disk First Aid). This has been happening sparratically on a number of our machines in our two main Mac computer rooms. There are three other rooms with similar machines which have not been effected. We have Gatekeeper and/or Gatekeeper Aid on all the machines. Also, Disinfectant finds nothing on either the floppy or the hard drive. Any clues? Some people suggest that it is a new virus. Others suggest a modified system or some init or cdev added to the system folder by naughty users. Personally, I have yet to see this happen, but I can't seem to figure out what the heck is going on. Thanks for any possible leads. Bob the Lizard Slave