A Terrabyte HDD (Funny)

[clarinathan]

Hi,

Just an amusing story about a laptop HDD.

A friend came round the other day to download some stuff over my ADSL connection this was going fine until a restart after which the computer wouldn't bootup.

He tried a re-install of windows etc all with no effect.

The next morning I took a look at it and decided to have a go a FDISKing the drive.

When I started FDISK and got into display partitions I was amazed to see that it reported a 50Gb drive!!

The laptop only has a 20Gb one!!

Next I tried Partition Magic 7 which came up with loads of errors and when it eventually loaded decided that I had a 200GB drive.

By this point we were most amused!!

As a last resort I tried booting from the win2kpro CD.

This actually booted (which winXP wouldn't)!

When I got to the page showing HDD properties it was rather interesting to note that I now had four partitions as below:

1: 20GB
2: 400GB
3: 1445GB
4: 256GB

Still amazingly the Win2k installer let me delete all this and left me with a fully functional 20GB drive again.

I guess that might say something about win2k over winxp!!

Hope you find this amusing, we certainly did.

[Aaron Cake]

Sounds like it was infected by a virus that encrypts the boot sector/partition table. Something like Stoned Monkey...I'd do a thorough virus check, and also check all floppies used while diagnosing the system.

[Damned Angel]

if any of the partitions showed up as being fat 8 or fat 1 then it is defiantly stoned monkey.b

I used to have lots of fun with this virus about 5 years ago when it was going around.

[JungleMan1]

Yep, my friend's 20GB drive was showing like 1000TB or something stupid...1000GB, 1000TB...I can't remember..

[MacGyver]

I remember one computer that was thrashed pretty good by the Monkey virus, it had a 120 megabyte drive that was reporting 4 gigs free - long before the days when even a 1 gig drive was on the market, and long before DOS started using comma separators for long numbers.

[clarinathan]

Funily enough, we checked it over with a couple of virus scanners and it found nothing.
I also checked all the floppies we used and they were fine too.

I used Norton AntiVirus 2002.

Would anyone suggest anything else?

[Lycia]

I had th esame problem a few months ago. I have an IBM 60GXP 60gig. I had it split to three partitions: 2 gig for system, 54 gig for data, and I think a 3 gig for swapfile. I was having XP problems and wanted to reinstall fresh, so I went to fdisk and removed the 2gig C partition. I remade the partition and began formating. At the end I noticed that it reported that the new partiton was 54 gigs!! OMG I've deleted all my drivers and porn and mp3s and games and saves!! I'm screwed!!! So thinking I'd just wipe the drive completley and re do everything I went back into Fdisk and displayed HDD info. Apparently I had two 54 gig partitions, giving me over 100 gig drive!!

I pluged this into a secondary machine as a slave copied everything over to another drive and low level formated it..then repartitioned it and formated. No problems since...