Do I have a Virus?

[nitz]

I've had three hard drives (1 scsi, 2 ATA) go bad on three seperate computer within a week. Only one of them was fixable with norton and that was only when the drive was put into another machine and started up as slave. One of the computers is at an employees house but he takes a lot of work home with him.

It always starts the same way, Start up computer (all 3 still on 9.2.2) and the disk is nowhere to be seen resulting in the blinking question mark. Only one of the ATA hard drives could be fixed with Norton. The error it gave was that there was a serious problem with the B tree structure and also that many nodes on the Hard drive were something something (No TV and no beer make Homer.......actually it is a german version of norton and I don't know what the translation is). I'm not really sure what that means but it took 5 times with norton to get it functioning.
The other ATA drive after a while started to make some sick clicking noise when starting up. That kind of leads me to believe that it isn't a virus and more of a mechanical failure.
Funnily enough I hooked the scsi one up to an OS X machine and it could only be seen as an unrecognizable scsi device in the system profiler but it wouldn't mount.

Does anybody know of a common or uncommon Mac virus that could wipe out a hard drives directory or screw up bios/firmware, possibly causing mechanical failures as well? It could be pure coincidence but if it isn't I'd sure like to know so I don't lose anymore hard drives

nitz

 

[LimeiBook86]

Uummm...

Maybe the drives are damaged...Try to use other Disk Utility Programs like TechTool Pro or Drive 10. That might fix your problem. I hope you get it fixed

 

[cc bcc]

Have you tried a virus scanner?

If not, sometimes lightning can destroy computers/tv's etc.

I recomment DiskWarrior in OS 9. I have been able to retrieve data from a crashed HD (ok it took dw about a day to find the files, the disk was making weird noises, but it worked!)

Good luck!

 

[shakespeare]

Almost certainly, it's not a virus. They are virtually nonexistent for any Mac OS.

 

[MacManiac1224]

It could be a motherboard malfunction that is damaging the drives when you put them in the machine (or the cable). most likely not a virus. I would use Disk Warrior to try to fix this problem, if there is information that you seriously need on that disk, then try Drive Savers.

 

[GeeYouEye]

Well, I can hopefully tell you about the SCSI. Probably, someone tried to hot-plug it. That's what the result is; a clicking sound at start-up and beyond (I have... um...shall we say... first-hand experience with this). I'm surprised that when it was hooked up again that the Comp even saw it existed, so it might not be that; generally hot-plugging SCSI renders it completely unusable.

As for the ATA, if they're IBM, and get moderate to heavy use, and have had about the same use for the same length of time, then it is quite conceivable that they happened to fail at the same time.

IOW, it could be anything from a virus to a lightning strike, from a mechanical failure, to a freak coincidence.

However... to my knowledge, it is not possible to write a virus that directly affects an individual part of the filesystem, at least in OS 9.

If I had to put money down on it... I'd say lightning and a mechanical failure.

 

[MacBandit]

There was a version of Norton in the past that upon doing a defrag your driver and partition files would be corrupted. I'm sure you aren't using that version of Norton any more but I figured it was worth mentioning.

The fix in the Norton situation was to startup off of the system install disks and use disk utility to reinstall the disk drivers. Sometimes you had to tell disk utility to reinstall the disk drivers multiple times before the fix would take.

 

[nitz]

seems like mechanical failure

was the problem in all three cases. Only one ATA could be saved (so that would have been software failure I guess). The others are goners. I just wanted to be sure because I started scanning all disks and files that were transfered to and from these HDs with an anti-virus program. Nothing was found. It was just a spooky coincidence that three HDs crashed in one week. Anyway, thank God for Retrospect!