File System is FAT22??

[Social Enemy]

I had a customer call me today that wasn't able to boot to from HDD, it just hangs at a flashing curser after the Hewlett Packard splash screen. I booted to a startup diskette and did a FDISK, and for the file system it showed FAT22. I'm doing this over the phone, so I'm not able to run a virus scanner on system. Has anybody came across this before? Is this a virus or something else?

[imaeditedbysowulo]

It's either a case of a virus or a DRU (dirty rotten user). I haven't heard of any viruses that change the disk display to FAT22, so I'd guess you've got a DRU on your hands. Best to hop in the car and take a look for yourself.

[geoscomp]

are you able to have scandisk run from your floppy?..There are a number of viruses that can corrupt the FAT table, but FAT22 should be impossible, since you need multiples of 8 bits for the fat table..i.e. fat 16, fat 32..hopefully someday fat64. There should be another fat stored that scandisk can find, unless everything has been overwritten. You might try fdisk /mbr and see if it helps