edmunds@gandalf.nosc.mil (Daniel G. Edmunds) (09/07/90)
Well, I think my Mac IIcx has come down with a strange virus. Seemingly
unrelated weird goings on have cropped up in the last two days. Not all
at once, but gradually. I have run Disenfectant 2.1 scans on numerous
occasions and turned up nothing.
The first thing that happened was that Finder Sounds just stopped working
when I closed a window. Everything looked OK, but it just wouldn't work.
I ran Dis 2.1 and it said that Finder Sounds had a corrupted data fork.
So I removed it from the system folder and continued on.
Later that day, I tried to print out a Word file on my PaintJet and I got
a "The application 'Microsoft Word' has unexpectedlly quit (1)" I tried
again and got the same message. I tried again with the printer set to draft
mode only (the other attempts had been "Best" mode) and it worked. Hmmm. I
tried printing with other programs and observed the same behavior.
This morning, Iwas editing an AutoCad drawing and the printer began printing
out a constant stream of three ascii characters in a repeating pattern
whenever the mouse was idle. As soon as I moved it or clicked, the
printer would stop until the mouse was idle and I wasn't in the middle of
a command. Then, suddenly, it stopped printing when the mouse was idle
and began to do it whenever the pointer was moved off of the drawing window
and onto a scroll bar or pull down menu (as long as the button is not
depressed) I should point out that this happened when a different printer was
selected with Chooser, and when no printer was selected.
I have tried reinstalling the system (6.0.5), rebuilding the desktop, runnig
with Finder on and Multifinder off and vice versa. The only recent change
to my system has been a Kensington Turbo ADB Mouse that is installed in the
same port as my old mouse had been in. That was a hardware change only,
no software was involved.
As you can probably tell, I am a new Mac user, and know little about the
inner workings of this thing. It could be a hardware problem, but the
seemingly unrelatedness and weirdness of these problems makes me think
that, I can't stop myself from saying this, my APPLE has a WORM in it.
Anything sound familiar to anyone?
Dan Edmunds (619) 672-0975
edmunds@gandalf.NOSC.MILebert@arisia.Xerox.COM (Robert Ebert) (09/08/90)
In article <2801@nosc.NOSC.MIL> edmunds@gandalf.nosc.mil (Daniel G. Edmunds) writes: >Well, I think my Mac IIcx has come down with a strange virus. > >I ran Dis 2.1 and it said that Finder Sounds had a corrupted data fork. >So I removed it from the system folder and continued on. > [other error descriptions deleted] > >I have tried reinstalling the system (6.0.5), rebuilding the desktop, runnig >with Finder on and Multifinder off and vice versa. > >Anything sound familiar to anyone? Yep. Really weird things like that were happening to me, too. They went on for months. I would have problems with a particular file or program, and would (eventually) give up and delete it and re-install it, at which time something ELSE would start acting weird. Perplexed me for months... until I got MacTools deluxe and tried the disk optimizer. It said the volume block map was damaged. So I ran a bunch of other utilities, including Disk First Aid, and they all said the same thing, but none of them were able to repair the problem or even tell me which files or blocks were affected. I ended up re-formatting my hard disk. [I know, re-initializing would have been enough, but I wanted to install a later revision of the Rodime drivers, and that required a re-formatting.] I re-installed everything from backups and things have been fine since. If you don't have a backup set, you can make one off your current disk. Only one (or a few) files should be corrupted, and you can just delete those later. Technically, what's happening is that the same disk block is being mapped to more than one file. So files get corrupted. Nothing will change until you delete one of the files that seems corrupted, or otherwise change which files are affected by the block mis-management... but when you do, some totally random (seeming) file will become corrupted. Does anyone know of a good utility for discovering which files are mapped to which blocks, or otherwise exploring the relationship of files to disk blocks? I remember doing this by hand in my Apple II days with DOS 3.3, but I don't know enough about the Mac file system to do the same thing now (with FEdit or whatever...) --Bob