VOGONS

Bootsector virus on old 3,5" disks

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First post, by stephanbde19

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Hi all,

I've tested DosBox and I'm really happy with it enabling me to play my old dos games. (though having some issues with a proper installation of the games)
But I have one serious problem: My old 3,5" disks became infected with a bootsector virus due to intensive disk exchange with my classmates 15 years ago.
With my old PC I never had problems with it, so I ignored the virus.
Now my antivirus tool throws alerts when I add a disk to the diskdrive in order to install a new game in DosBox.
Can I ignore the warnings?
My host is running with XP.

Thx in advance and kind regards

Stephan

Reply 1 of 3, by wd

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You'll surely get no reply like "everything's safe". So it's up to you. Especially
be careful to remove the floppy when restarting the pc and stuff like that.

Leave out dosbox for the moment, copy all files from the floppy to some
directory on your harddrive (you should be rather safe during that so you
might/might not want to ignore the AV messages). Then remove the floppy,
scan the copied files.

Reply 2 of 3, by Snover

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Any good modern antivirus should be able to clean the virus without a problem. That said, as long as you make sure you don't have your floppy drive set as boot first, or make sure you remove the disks before you turn on the computer, you shouldn't have a problem.

Yes, it’s my fault.

Reply 3 of 3, by wd

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If they fail, you have a hard time getting the files at all, so i'd recommend copying the files first.

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