mikerofone
Experienced Member
Hi all,
some things happened so long ago that best practices have fallen out of my memory.
TL;DR: Do not use write-enabled floppies on unknown / newly acquired systems before doing a full virus scan.
I was surprised to find that I was no longer able to mount some floppies on my Linux Mint machine. Upon insertion into my USB floppy drive, dmesg showed error messages like `partition table partially beyond EOD, truncated` and the floppy was reported to have partitions. Mounting the floppy resulted in garbled directories, i.e. filenames with all sorts of weird characters, 2GB file size etc.
Turns out, a machine I recently got had the AntiExe bootsector virus, and was spreading it onto my disks. Linux interprets the virus code as partition information (?) and gets confused. I actually had this happen before, where I spread Parity Boot across a bunch of disks by using them in an infected laptop I had gotten.
So, in the future, I hope I'll remember to:
1) Write-protect all my boot and utility disks.
2) Run f-prot antivirus first thing on any system / disk I add to my collection.
3) Format disks / hard drives using a bootdisk, not via the system that is installed.
Posting this here since my googling for the dmesg errors or failing floppy mounts in Linux didn't yield any results. Maybe this will save someone else similar headaches.
Now, don't mind me while I go scanning some floppy disks... *grumble*
Cheers
mikerofone
some things happened so long ago that best practices have fallen out of my memory.
TL;DR: Do not use write-enabled floppies on unknown / newly acquired systems before doing a full virus scan.
I was surprised to find that I was no longer able to mount some floppies on my Linux Mint machine. Upon insertion into my USB floppy drive, dmesg showed error messages like `partition table partially beyond EOD, truncated` and the floppy was reported to have partitions. Mounting the floppy resulted in garbled directories, i.e. filenames with all sorts of weird characters, 2GB file size etc.
Turns out, a machine I recently got had the AntiExe bootsector virus, and was spreading it onto my disks. Linux interprets the virus code as partition information (?) and gets confused. I actually had this happen before, where I spread Parity Boot across a bunch of disks by using them in an infected laptop I had gotten.
So, in the future, I hope I'll remember to:
1) Write-protect all my boot and utility disks.
2) Run f-prot antivirus first thing on any system / disk I add to my collection.
3) Format disks / hard drives using a bootdisk, not via the system that is installed.
Posting this here since my googling for the dmesg errors or failing floppy mounts in Linux didn't yield any results. Maybe this will save someone else similar headaches.
Now, don't mind me while I go scanning some floppy disks... *grumble*
Cheers
mikerofone