Do I have a BIOS VIRUS ????

I have a problem with a PC that appeared to be running fine until last week. It is my wifes and she suspects her AVG was shut down by a VIRUS some time ago (dont ask LOL). She continued to use the PC until I noticed unrecognizable text after she locked up and attempted a reboot.

At this point I knew she was toast. Since then I have tried everything to get this thing running again. Most times on reboot it will not see any drives. If you are lucky it will see the DVD burner and the 160G SATA.

I have tried to repartition and reformatting the SATA drive with FDISK from a command prompt, with Partition Magic from a command prompt, and with Disk Management from a UBCD4 Win desktop. It will still not allow an OS to be loaded. When I tried to load Fedora 10 it told me "GOOD LUCK!".

At this point I decided to go another route and just try to get a good post (I was thinking hardware at this point) so I removed the SATA drive. Earlier in this post I mentioned "unrecognizable text ". You can recognize the characters but they are not the ones you typed. There were also some brightness issues and vertical lines. I replaced the PCIE Video Card with a new one from NewEgg and it cleared up the bright spots and vertical lines but not the scrambled text during the boot.

I have since tried reflashing the MB BIOS (two different Versions), as well as, the Video Card BIOS. These flashes seem to go through the process but have no effect on my problem.

I have been hesitant to try any of this ailing systems hardware in a working machine.

Its hard for me to believe that this is the result of an attack. I have googled and not found any intel on a BIOS level virus that is in circulation at this time. Its also hard to believe that all the attempts to repair this system have been fruitless.


Please HELP!!!!!!

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
BIOS viruses are exceedingly rare and in over 10 years as a professional and certified PC bench tech I have never seen one. I have heard they exist but that may be untrue. Anyway- it would appear that you have not swapped out the RAM or run any memory diagnostics; I use the bootable type of RAM diagnostics and use this one regularly. Your problems could also be related to a faulty hard drive or DVD drive, and lastly, it could be the motherboard or CPU or even the power supply. So, after testing the RAM and/or swapping it out for known good RAM from a different PC, run full diagnostics on your drives (or swap 'em out with known good drives and cables) and maybe swap out the power supply too....
God luck!!
:-D

 

Hey dlb do you know of any software that could scan for such viruses?