Can a virus boot the system all the time?

[lauri.lotvonen]

Hi.

I've been using the Hxc SD Floppy Emulator for quite a while
now in my A600.

After about a month using it, the A600 started randomly booting (like it was doing CTRL-A-A) on all games and WB etc...

I looked closely and did not find any bad connections, as I assumed, since I have moved the LCD screen and the buttons to the A600 case.

Tried the Hxc in another A600 and A500, same thing on those, random boots.

As a last option I formatted the whole SD card, put a fresh Hxc .CFG file in it, and only one game. The game (Ruff'nRumble) has run over a 2 hours now without booting.

Could it been that one of the adf's contained a virus that spreaded on all the other disks, since the card was not write protected?

Is there even a virus that can boot your whole system, or am I just lost with this conclusion?

And could you guys recommend me some virus snooping software, that I can just boot/load from the adf image?

[tingo]

Anti-virus software:
these looks promising:
http://68k.aminet.net/util/virus/AntiBeol_133.lha
http://68k.aminet.net/util/virus/avd.lha

And perhaps VirusZ (http://68k.aminet.net/package/util/virus/VirusZ) is recommended?
And a integrity checker: http://68k.aminet.net/package/util/virus/Integrity

I haven't used anti-virus software for Amiga in many years now, so it would be good to get recommendations from people with more recent experience.

[broken]

To me it sounds like some corruption on the SD card was causing the HxC to reboot the machine.

[Franko]

While it would be perfectly simple to write a Virus that would randomly reset your Amiga I don't recall anyone actually doing so, it would be a pretty lame and useless virus, if that's all it did...

Doubt it's a virus causing you problems, sounds more like to me to be a hardware problem. In which case the age old method of removing all hardware from your system comes into play and re-instating them one by one until the problem re-occurs...

I know a lot of folk don't like doing this but in the long run rather than spending days or weeks trying to figure out something like this, it's best really to do so straight away and spend a couple of hours doing so as you'll most likely end up having to do this in the end...

Only virus I still have left on some 8000 odd ADF files is one on the game "Time Bandit" which I keep out of nostalgia just to remind of what an Amiga virus actually looked like...

[Magitius]

I indeed had a virus like that in the '90s. I had an Amiga 1200 that booted itself randomly and at the time I couldn't find a virus checker that recognized the virus. I had no choice but to erase all infected disks (a lot!). But I suppose these days virus checkers probably can find that s.o.b of a virus more easily. Good luck! :pint:

Edit: Yes, the random crashing went away with the formatting and everything was back to normal once again.

[Franko]

I indeed had a virus like that in the '90s. I had an Amiga 1200 that booted itself randomly and at the time I couldn't find a virus checker that recognized the virus. I had no choice but to erase all infected disks (a lot!). But I suppose these days virus checkers probably can find that s.o.b of a virus more easily. Good luck! :pint:

More likely the opposite (ie: a virus checker wont find it) especially if it was a little known virus and has never been included in any Virus Checkers database...

[Magitius]

More likely the opposite (ie: a virus checker wont find it) especially if it was a little known virus and has never been included in any Virus Checkers database...

Well, let's wait and see what lauri.lotvonen can dig up from his machine?

[lauri.lotvonen]

I scanned about 50 adf's using the Virusz-II, when suddenly it hit the screen:

!! Pirates! disk A has a virus called "Disaster Master 2" !!

So there was a virus somewhere after all... If I remember correctly, all the prob's started when I popped the Pirates! image in for the first time.

Thanks for your help, and I'll report if the problems start again :lol:.

BTW, I would like to know if someone here know's what that "disaster master" -virus usually does to your system?

[Matt_H]

I scanned about 50 adf's using the Virusz-II, when suddenly it hit the screen:

!! Pirates! disk A has a virus called "Disaster Master 2" !!

So there was a virus somewhere after all... If I remember correctly, all the prob's started when I popped the Pirates! image in for the first time.

Thanks for your help, and I'll report if the problems start again :lol:.

BTW, I would like to know if someone here know's what that "disaster master" -virus usually does to your system?

http://www.vht-dk.dk/amiga/desc/txt/disastermaster-2.htm

[freqmax]

When did the last virus for Amiga show up?

[PanterHZ]

I do belive this virus was created in the good old AmigaOS 1.3 days, and  when taking into consideration how many 1.3 programs that refuses to  work with newer OS versions, I think the same goes for many old viruses  as well. My lucky guess is that the virus wasn't able to do what it was  supposed to do and crashed the Amiga instead (hence the reboots).

[lauri.lotvonen]

Im upping this post again because the sudden crash/booting continued after a while ...
Could it be that the PSU im using is giving all the trouble?

I used an old A500 PSU and the a600 crashed all the time.
(Allthough the heavyweight A500 PSU should be better than the flimsy original A600 lightwight PSU)

Then I changed it back to the original lightwight A600 PSU and ran a game 10 hours straight without any probs.

[Brian]

Im upping this post again because the sudden crash/booting continued after a while ...
Could it be that the PSU im using is giving all the trouble?

I used an old A500 PSU and the a600 crashed all the time.
(Allthough the heavyweight A500 PSU should be better than the flimsy original A600 lightwight PSU)

Then I changed it back to the original lightwight A600 PSU and ran a game 10 hours straight without any probs.

Sounds very much like a damaged PSU to me.

There's several symptoms that can be related to weak or damaged PSU. Intermittent reboots is one of them. Internal HDD spindown/up is another. I even had the mousepointer get corrupted during high powerdrawn on my old A1200 with BPPC040 and BVision.

[gertsy]

I Didn't think it was a virus rebooting your machine. How could such a small thing reach the Ctrl and Amiga, Amiga keys?  
But 3 viruses jumping on the same keys in unison might be able to do it.

[Franko]

Im upping this post again because the sudden crash/booting continued after a while ...
Could it be that the PSU im using is giving all the trouble?

I used an old A500 PSU and the a600 crashed all the time.
(Allthough the heavyweight A500 PSU should be better than the flimsy original A600 lightwight PSU)

Then I changed it back to the original lightwight A600 PSU and ran a game 10 hours straight without any probs.

Think you answered your own question there...

@ Gertsy

Dunno, there's a big virus that live's at the bottom of me garden and it's huge, got 18 fingers like baseball bats, but I don't think it's clever enough to reset a miggy, all it ever says is Ugh and Bongo's...