Just a bit of advise to all Amiga users out there...
On my A600 I noticed things were sometimes crashing when before I had no crashes. Even trying to run the "Format" program to format a disk wouldn't work (came up with a recoverable software failure). And then in other cases, programs would work but then crash on exit (recoverable software failure).
I noticed something odd...in my '.deldir' on my PFS partition ('.recycled' if you run SFS) there were things in there which shouldn't be in there...things that I had not deleted... So there'd be my C command Assign in the .deldir, and another one in my C drawer (also a bit larger file size).
It confused me for a day or two, but eventually I installed VirusZ. It immediately found and removed the Ebola virus from memory....It then found around 40 infected files, mostly C commands, and also some Libs and handlers in L:. Clock, Format, some Commodities etc which it then continued to repair all files successfully. The virus made some other programs crash, despite those programs being uninfected. It even re-infected some XAD libs whilst doing the check if I remember correctly, so I had to run the check a few times to make sure the Virus had been totally killed.
I traced the source of the virus to something I downloaded last year from "Zeb's Amiga Downloads" website. It was Magic Workbench. I have a fully registered MagicWB disk, but I was setting up the harddrive in my A600 via WinUAE so it should have been easier this way. I then ran the Virus check on my WinUAE AmigaSYS 4 (what I had used to set up my A600 hard drive) and it found even more cases of the Ebola virus. Now I know why HDInst tools and HDtoolbox were crashing etc.
Fortunately, my main Amiga (1200) remained virus-free, despite all the stuff I have downloaded for it from similar sites over the years. Basically, everything I download now gets checked from within Voodoo-X (it uses the xvs.library) before I actually unarchive it to RAM or my hard drive. I've been lucky up to yet, but only just. If people have instability issues with their Amiga, the first thing I would advise now is to run a Virus scan.
I hope one day the xvs.library will be updated as it's now 8 years out of date. There's every possibility that new viruses are around right now, undetected by the out of date xvs.library. I seem to remember reading about a recent virus that attacks Emulated Amiga's (real Amiga's are safe!). So make sure you remain safe....virus check your adf's and your lha's etc before giving them residence on your system.
