In a message dated 10/6/2000 11:13:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< I have a PC which was continually rebooting if I tried to use Outlook
Express.  Norton revealed the Kakworm virus. This was removed.  Or rather,
the guy tried to remove it.  He was in registry, clicked on the export
registry file and the machine froze solid. He pushed reset and now the
machine will not post. Won't get to a boot disc either. It comes on with the
hdd light continually on but thats it.  No monitor, no other activity.  The
machine is a Cyrix (beleived to be an early pentium) running win98 and has 16
meg ram.

 Have we killed this poor machine? Or is there some way out of this dilemma?
Advice would be greatly appreciated.

 Rick Thornton >>

Hi,
  One of the things *some* virii do is to over-write the BIOS code, if you
have an updateable (flashable) BIOS chip. If this happens, the symptoms are
that the computer will continue to run after the BIOS code has been
overwritten, because most PC's copy the BIOS code to RAM when booting, as RAM
has much faster access than the BIOS chip.
  When the virus infects the system, the original copy of the BIOS gets
trashed by the virus, but the working copy (in RAM) the PC is using is still
OK, so the computer still functions, UNTIL it gets rebooted. That causes it
to go back to the original copy of the BIOS for the POST, which has been
corrupted by the virus, so it does not POST.
  So you have a computer that was working.....then you reboot, and it is
totally dead, no beeps, no video, no POST, nothing, which sounds just like
what you describe happened to your system.
  Unfortunately, the only fix if this is the case, is a new BIOS chip, or to
get yours "re-flashed" with the correct BIOS code (a few of the better
equipped computer shops have EEPROM programmers that can do this).

HTH,
Peter Hogan
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