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Author Topic: Amiga 600 problems  (Read 3418 times)

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Online Thomas

Re: Amiga 600 problems
« on: July 21, 2007, 10:16:37 PM »

I am sorry but from what you say, those games probably cannot be repaired.

What happened is that your disks are infected by a bootblock virus. A bootblock virus behaves like a normal AmigaDOS bootblock and as such is invisible in most cases.

But in your case those games were copy protected originally. The copy protection was dones by using custom boot code in the boot block. This custom boot code was the only one who knew how to read the rest of the disk. Now that the custom boot code has been overwritten by the virus, the rest of the disk is worthless.

You can remove the virus, but this does not make the game run again.

In order to not spread the virus any further, do these steps:

1. switch off the computer to remove the virus from memory
2. write protect all your floppy disks and don't ever remove the protection
3. switch on the computer and insert the first disk
4. If it starts to boot and then says "not a dos disk", remove it, mark it as virus infected and don't touch it again
If it does not boot but returns to the disk animation, mark it as not infected and not bootable
If it boots ok mark it as possibly virus infected
5. switch the computer off
6. switch it on again and test the next disk.
7. after you have tested all disks, you have three stacks. One is surely infected, one is not infected, but not bottable and one is perhaps infected

Well, now you are screwed because now you need a bootable disk which is definitely not infected. And you don't have such.

Once you got a clean boot disk, you can use it to remove the virus from the other disks. No special program is needed to remove a bootblock virus. Just install a new bootblock on the disks. You do this by issuing the command

install df0:

in a Shell window. Just be sure that you never boot from an infected disk. And if you do, switch off the computer and start all over again.

Bye,
Thomas