dormcat wrote on 2021-10-30, 09:20:
If I were you I'd take out its HDD and scan it with a modern or near-modern (WinXP or later) computer.
Well I thought Win XP is much more dangerous than DOS/Win 3.1.
But yes, there are virii on DOS, yes.
I learnt this by a friend calling me in 1987 because he thought his computer is defective because the characters were falling down the screen.
🤣! As a technician I immediately saw this could not be a hardware defect.
I took an infected file on diskette and disassembled it.
It was easy to write a scanner that recognized the signature of the Blackjack virus and isolated it by renaming the infected files.
What about just plugging the HDD into a Linux computer (maybe using an USB-IDE adapter), zipping it and then sending the zip file to virustotal ?
I wonder, will it still recognize these ancient virii?
I'd suggest to keep bugres and fakefrmt, though 😁
(Well, Windows 10 refuses to copy these files, complaining these are bad programs... awesome! Maybe Windows Defender can also be used for detection of DOS virii?)