Crazy Boot (computer Virus)

Crazy Boot is a computer virus that infects the Microsoft Windows operating systems causing no physical damage nor direct loss of information; it would be known as a hoax to some. If the host computer is booted from an infected floppy disk, this virus makes it look as though all physical hard drives have been lost. Crazy Boot spreads through unprotected disks easily. It spreads only on diskettes, not by file distribution. The virus resides in memory, it infects the master boot records of all physical hard disks and infects the boot sectors of floppy disks. If Crazy Boot is in memory, any access to the boot record is rerouted to a copy of the original boot sector. When the virus infects a hard drive, it makes a copy of the partition table (an important part of the system area), writes the copy, and deletes the original partition table. To read the partition information, Crazy Boot must be active in memory. If users boot from a floppy disk not infected by this virus in order to avoid it, all physical hard drives are inaccessible by normal means.

The virus has a counter which causes the following text to be displayed:

DON'T PLAY WITH THE PC! OTHERWISE YOU WILL GET IN 'DEEP, DEEP' TROUBLE!. . . CRAZY BOOT VER. 1.0

Famous quotes containing the words crazy and/or boot:

    I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    ... until the shopkeeper plants his boot in our eyes,
    and unties our bone and is finished with the case,
    and turns to the next customer, forgetting our face
    or how we knelt at the yellow bulb with sighs
    like moth wings for a short while in a small place.
    Anne Sexton (1928–1974)