How much damage can a virus do?

axer

Hey y'all,

Can a virus cause permanent damage to a harddrive?

Ruu_Old

There was one out nearly 10 years ago that attempted to rewrite the BIOS ROM and wipe the files from the hard drive, apart from that there are no other viruses that I have heard of that cause permanent damage.

Karoma

^ CIH? Even that wasn't bad. gotta watch the magahurtz-stoler virus!

Ruu_Old

Karoma wrote:

^ CIH? Even that wasn't bad. gotta watch the magahurtz-stoler virus!

Aye thats it, it was expected to cause more damage that it did I think.

mathias

As far as I know , there is no virus that can do lasting hardware damage , the worst I got was back in Win98 days and it put 32 partitions on my hard-drive , and wiped all data obviously , the machine was recoverable by re-installing windows and was fine afterwards but I lost tons of Data.

This was the culprit ,
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/opasoft.shtml
It only attacked win9x and it was impossible for it to get a winxp machine ,

axer

Thanks for yeer replies. The reason I asked is because I have a computer that would not boot until I upgraded the bios and then found the harddrive had 4k in bad sectors. I ran huitil (samsung's harddrive diagnostic tool) where it showed a number of error messages so I did a low level format on the harddrive where it came up with errors also and could not continue the format.

Karoma

The HDD could simply be knackered. If it's within warranty: get in touch with the manufacturer. If not, let SpinRite or similar have a go at it.

bounty

i suppose a virus could turn off your pc fans...

Tar.Aldarion

And bam, chernobyl!

Ruu_Old

Theres plenty of hoaxes out there as well.

CComms

A virus cannot turn off your fans, or stop your kettle from switching off when the water is boiled, or make a cup of tea. A virus is just a program loaded on to a PC. It uses an operating system to function. Your fan is not controlled by your operating system it will still function without a hard drive.

Nukem

CComms wrote:

It uses an operating system to function

Dont think thats entirely true. Had a friends PC a few months back and this little virus took me ages to figue out. Disabled the USB support only after the Bios screen and messed with loads of other BIOS options when i went digging. It was an XP system as well. Told him stop looking at porn;)

axer

Karoma wrote:

The HDD could simply be knackered. If it's within warranty: get in touch with the manufacturer. If not, let SpinRite or similar have a go at it.

Thats what I figured too. Gone back to Komplett already.

axer

CComms wrote:

A virus cannot turn off your fans, or stop your kettle from switching off when the water is boiled, or make a cup of tea. A virus is just a program loaded on to a PC. It uses an operating system to function. Your fan is not controlled by your operating system it will still function without a hard drive.

You never heard of win32.lyonstea.nomilk ?

Thanks for all the replies.

boidey

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

And bam, chernobyl!

Now that was a virus, I saw a quite a few dead m/b from that one.