My money is on it _not_ being a virus, given the number of partition table
sectors (and disks generally) world-wide which will go belly-up today like
any other day. Out of 2x10**8 PCs, I'd expect something like 1x10**5 to
have a serious disk problem on any given day, by the time you combine HD
MTBF and good old-fashioned bugs. And of course, people screwing up with
FDISK and blaming a virus when their boss asks why they haven't got any work
done.
One way to make a backup of your partition table sector (MBR) for next time
:-) would appear to be:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/floppy/savembr bs=512 count=1
[off-topic] I wrote a DOS version of this, too, as part of my free DOS
anti-virus stuff I did about 6 years ago (when DOS viruses such as Stoned,
Form, etc were the main problem). It saves the MBR and the active boot
sector in a magic file, so you can later restore them, or compare them
against the current live versions to detect viruses, etc. About twice a
year I would undo somebody's FDISKing, to their total amazement.
|\ | o _ |/ Life's like a jigsaw
| \| | |_ |\ You get the straight bits
But there's something missing in the middle
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