Erased Partitions- OS not found

[paperoga]

Hi folks,
one of our labs had 7 out of 10 computers completely wiped out: no operating system and more important no partitions.
The guy that is in charge of the lab told us that it happened pretty much at the same time for most computers.
He also told us that on a couple of machines, it happened after he had to reboot them due to a software crash.
Does it sound familiar?

 

[edfair]

There are some virus attacks that supposedly do this. I've been fortunate and never had one, so I can't verify that it really happens.
The partiton table is part of one sector of the hard drive, so any program that can manipulate sector by sector is capable of doing it. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[dumdum]

Sounds like a MBR virus. You may want to ensure that you have the virus protection enabled for your computer's bios. Also, there are several command line settings you can use to try and fix the MBR. I would suggest that before starting over from scratch We are always looking for new members at: forums.jlrforum.net Please come join our community too.

 

[Guest_imported]

The command FDISK/MBR rewrites the Master Boot Record from the undocumented spare copy which exists on the hard drive. if the virus did not wipe out the spare copy, then the command may just revive the PC.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I saw something similar on a machine whose disk controller went on to fail.

Putting the disk into a different machine revealed the "missing" partition.

At first, I too thought it might be a virus...

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk