Virus Imprinted on Motherboard?

tgelston · Mar 13, 2006

Hello,

My sister in law recently had a major virus problem. I am on the opposite coast so I could only do phone diagnosis - sounded bad - was in system restore and several DLL files that were critical system files were infected. She ended up using a local computer service. They reformatted her harddrive and reinstalled the programs and docs. One thing they told her is that the virus has imprinted itself on the motherboard and she now must use a boot disk everytime she starts up the computer.

This sounds pretty strange to me. First - what did he mean "imprinted on the MB"? Does he mean in the BIOS? I mean where the heck else could a virus "imprint" itself on the MB? And if it is in the BIOS can't you just flash the BIOS? Or does he mean in the boot sector of the HD? Again though wouldn't a wipe and reformat get rid of that? I would love somone to shed some light on this issue - I consider myself fairly computer literate and have never heard of anything like this happening.

Thanks,
Tobias

PS - They charged $400 and had the computer for a week

chaslang · Mar 13, 2006

For $400 dollars you could buy a pretty nice new computer.

I seriously doubt there is a virus on the "imprinted on the motherboard". In fact it sounds rather silly. Yes it would have to mean the BIOS but if that were the case why did the have to reinstall the whole system. If the problem was in the BIOS to begin with (and that is unlikely but not impossible), they should have fixed the BIOS. The whole thing sounds rather fishy to me.

What exactly is he boot disk you are referring to? What OS are we talking about?

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Virus Imprinted on Motherboard?

tgelston Private E-2

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member