Came into work this morning and Appearently there is a new moddified version of the blaster virus out now that does a low level format on your machine.. Keep the virus scanners updated, Ill post more details as I get them..
I came in this morning, and my "My Pictures" Subfolder was open, and 2 internet explorers were open, both with a search going for internet explorer... weird eh?
low level formats were used normally on the older mfm hard drives back in the 8088, XT days (this was waay before pentium.. like, it went 8088, 80286, 80386, 80486, pentium). Also used for sometimes trying to recover bad sectors on a disk drive. Low level format shouldn't be done on newer style drives, it's bad for them. Stan
whats 1 more virus on my pc god i need to format my pos at home. anyone have a copy of xp i can borrow?
Stan, The old low level format terms you are thinking of don't really apply today. The low level format from back in the day was meant to initialize and map out sectors, set interleave etc. These days media errors are generally mapped and ignored by the drive's firmware unless they grow beyond manufacturers spec in which case the drive will start giving out errors. In modern bios's low level format means write zeros on all the data sectors to remove the chance of 'unformating' the data section of the drive since an OS format just re-writes the file allocation table. Generally today a low level format means writing zero's out to all the sectors. Hard disk manufacturers usually have a low level util that will zero the boot sector as well. Bios low level format utils generally just zero the data sectors. You should only need to low level format your drive with a manufacturers util if you get a bad boot sector virus. A regular format just re-writes the file allocation tables so the file system isn't aware of where the files are. They are still there however. This is done to save time and prevent unwanted data loss. Writing zeros to all the sectors on a big drive can take hours and hours. The problem with a regular format is it still leaves the data on the drive untill you use up enough space that it needs to re-use the space occupied by the old files. Not to be picky but that statement should read "A normal format can be recovered, a low-level format can't by regular unformat." It is totally possible to recover low level formatted data even if it's been done several times! Granted you need very expensive hardware to do it, but if you've got something to hide you want to do what's known as a secure erase. In Unix you can simply use dd and take data in from /dev/urandom. This will write random bits on the drive over and over again. On a windows machine you can download a secure erase util. No one really knows how many over-writes you have to do to totally obliterate all traces but there have been studies done where a drive was secure-erased up to 5 times and the data was still recoverable by simply doing an off-track read. Granted someone would REALLY want to get at that data but just to be safe any machines or drives that leave our company are secure-erased no less than 10 times.
Patch your systems bitches! Windows NT Workstation Windows NT Server 4.0 Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows XP 64 bit Edition Windows XP 64 bit Edition Version 2003 Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 64 bit Edition
