I have a machine on which I was running slackware, mint and archbang when I foolishly strayed into a den of online modern-day ali babas, one of whom shafted me with some kind of virus because of a dispute.

Symptoms:

1. constant beeping noise;
2. as i typed text, it was converted into meaningless code;
3. when i inserted partition magic into drive and loaded it, it too was scrambled (the program itself loads into ram; so it is uneffected, being "ro";
4. any attempt to kernel fails
5. any attempt to get to bios fails
   
   Anyone able to help: I just want to fdisk -z it back to basic usability,
   not at all necessary to save or retrieve data!
   
   Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer suggestions
   regs,
   

A Linux virus? That's rare. How was it introduced? It's seldom worth venturing into a den of thieves. Ali Baba wan't a thief, btw.

What do you mean by "any attempt to kernel"? Is kernel a verb?

fdisk doesn't have a -z option.

Why not just boot a live CD and use parted or fdisk to repartiton the drive?

Well, I am sure quite a few packages include some kind of -z option, so there is not a good answer for that.

But if you boot to a live CD/DVD then nothing on the hard drive should be affecting it - it is entirely in RAM.

So my guess would be that maybe you have bad RAM or other hardware problem.

I think the gparted live CD included memtest86 - try running that.

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I think this is hardware failure, maybe keyboard or it's io.


I have never heard about virus that affects bios code.

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thanks;
IO = ?

thanks Astrogeek: I have gparted and memtest apps on a live CD tool collection called partition magic, but as I say in my original post, when I boot to that, it goes crazy.
Perhaps needs to go to disc doctor or rubbish heap....

Yea, it really does sound like a hardware failure if you can't even load memtest.

If you have access to something with the same kind of memory modules, that would be my first guess and just try swapping them out.

IO = Input/Output, that is the 'IO' in BIOS.

I apologize, Tex. I simply didn't understand anything you wrote in your initial post. It was my fault. I was a little drunk at the time.

Again, I beg your pardon for the unhelpful post.

Don't mention it Z. If anything, I should be apologizing for my immoderate response: it was overly acerbic and touchy by a long shot.

I have had a frustrating and harrowing week bedding in a new system (finally succeeded with a lot of help from Allend and others: yea!!) with Slackware -current; on top of which I've had a hard time trying to work out what to do with my old machine which I had thought had been the subject of an attack, but which, after reading your post and those of others, may well be down to a simple, and fixable, hardware problem.

Anyway, great if we can both put it behind us.

Cheers