Software on my virus infected 1985 PC 

Easy enough if it's an IDE drive, IDE to SATA or USB bridges are common, you'd hitch the drive to a more modern PC & you'd run DDrescue rather than DD by preference if the drive is known to be flaky.. in the case of MFM or RLL drives though, it gets way more difficult, you're restricted to what the machine will run natively. Which basically means old versions of ghost if you're lucky & it's beefy enough, or spinrite, or scandisk followed by copy as a last resort. Scandisk tends to destroy data it can't read though, spinrite is way better at recovering what's there, when it works. Even if you transferred the controller card to a PC powerful enough to boot Linux to try running DD (assuming you find one that meets that requirement & also has ISA slots), I have doubts that the card or drive would be recognised by the kernel.

I’m from Belgium. Bought it on a local listing a while back (not from the original owner). Did find out who the original owner was and what the PC was used for … more to come ! :)

@@RetroSpector78 thanks for replying, that makes sense! Your English is great, I thought you're from the States. I'm sorry for being so short sighted, of course you could've been from Belgium too and the person who wrote the clone as well! I find it fascinating that you've found such a time capsule and it gave me that late eighties early nighties feeling again! (I know the computer is older but that's when we got our first PC at home) Thanks for the great content and I wish you happy holidays!👍

Its running in CGA simulation on a hercules card. Downloaded a version from internet and it didn’t have that glitch.

Stoned virus doesn’t infect files, just the mbr of the hard drive and the first boot sector of floppies. So the content of the hard drive (files) is clean.

@@RetroSpector78 That's assuming that the stoned virus is the only malware on the pc. While it most likely is given the nature of malware from back in the day, but given my learning how to pentest so I can obtain a future cybersecurity job, I've learned to assume everything is dirty. Call me paranoid, but I've found vulnerabilities in my own system that would be really difficult to know if you've been infected unless you looked through the system through the use of a known clean system (and depending on if your threat model includes corporate or government interference, you may have to pull a scorched earth model and build everything from the ground up).

The point of what I'm saying is, the time period of the system will grant it the likelihood that the only malware on the system is the stoned virus (as malware from that time tended to be more in your face and not stuff like spyware which silently tracked or monitored you). In modern times though, you get no such guarantee.

You should check out Jim Leonard’s channel and his blog post on the 8088 MPH demo

He's got a great podcast still

Stoned virus is limited to boot sector. Not files. I didn’t image the drive, simply copied over the files.

I also have always had better luck with older versions of spinrite when trying to resurrect old MFM/RLL disks... Version 2 seems reasonable.

hehe ... Perhaps I'll dedicate a video on cleaning it especially for you :)

hehe .... previous owner had a clothing shop :)

Don’t think the stoned virus infects files and causes bad sectors. Just installs itself in the mbr and infects the first sector of floppies.

@@RetroSpector78 it makes the file system be read incorrectly so the computer thinks the file is on the sector being read but the retrying eventually makes the file load hence the computer is stoned as if it smoked some good weed

The “Stoned” DOS virus was also documented by my boi dannooct1. Hopefully that helps some. That should in theory give you the sample name.

Also a bit of a hassle to get the drive out, put it in another pc. You need to transfer the controller also as it is matched up with the hard drive. And it is a big hard drive :)

@@RetroSpector78 or extract hard disk sector to img file same as roms dump ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-q__R8khTwo8.html

That’s not always as straightforward as it sounds. You need a period correct machine and also take into account the controller card. This is the type of machine with a harddisk that predates IDE, so it needs it’s own bespoke controller card. With more modern computers, it’s a lot simpler, there are even IDE to SATA adapters that you can use if you have to. But with a machine and harddrive this age, it’s sadly not possible. I have an Acorn Archimedes 310 (which my dad bought in 1989) with a non working harddrive. It’s an ST-506 and it gave up the ghost many years ago. Luckily the machine’s floppy drive still works.

@@Master_Cheese-kf2mm And where would you image the drive TO? You need another drive with enough free space to hold a whole hard drive. The only thing that comes to mind is maybe an XT-IDE board, if he has one.

Luckily it's just a few megabytes in size, if it was gigabytes then it would take an eternity over parallel.

Yikes. What are you doing to your poor computers? ;-) I’ve lost a few hard drives, and a couple PSUs. But rarely has something silicon completely failed without good reason.

i have been running a xeon e3 1271 (essentially an i7 4770) nonstop for 7 years in an hp sff rendering mapping data. what are you doing to your silicon lol?

I built my friend an i5 2500k machine in 2011... he still uses it nearly every day