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- Path: sparky!uunet!charon.amdahl.com!pacbell.com!ames!sun-barr!rutgers!netnews.upenn.edu!netnews.cc.lehigh.edu!news
- From: duck@nuustak.csir.co.za (Paul Ducklin)
- Newsgroups: comp.virus
- Subject: Re: Is this a virus? (PC)
- Message-ID: <0001.9211161950.AA15221@barnabas.cert.org>
- Date: 13 Nov 92 16:20:38 GMT
- Sender: virus-l@lehigh.edu
- Lines: 20
- Approved: news@netnews.cc.lehigh.edu
-
- Thus spake rknazik@x102a.harris-atd.com (knazik bob):
- >My 386 PC reports that I have 654360 conventional memory when I do a
- >"chkdsk" or a "mem" (DOS 5.0). This is 1024 short of the expected
- >amount. I seem to remember that there was a virus that caused this
- >result, but VSCAN finds nothing wrong. Does anyone know if this is a
- >virus or just some weird hardware failure ? Any help is appreciated.
-
- Some BIOSes use the top 1KB of the DOS 640KB area as an extension to
- the BIOS data area at 0040:0000, so 1KB missing at the top of DOS
- memory might be quite normal.
-
- Boot clean and then try MEM. The figure you see reported after a clean
- boot is the "normal" figure for your PC. If you boot from hard disc and
- see less than "normal", you may then get worried..
-
- - --
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- Paul Ducklin duck@nuustak.csir.co.za
-
- CSIR Computer Virus Research Lab * Box 395 * Pretoria * 0001 S Africa
-