Virus Name: DA'BOYS Aliases: DALLAS COWBOYS V Status: New, Research Discovery: January, 1994 Symptoms: Possible diskette access problems; BSC; Infected disks fail to boot on 8088 or 8086 processors; No COM4. Origin: USA Eff Length: 251 Bytes Type Code: BORaX - Resident Overwriting Boot Sector and Master Boot Sector Infector Detection Method: None Removal Instructions: DOS SYS General Comments: The DA'BOYS virus will only work with DOS 5 or DOS 6+ with an 80186 or better processor. Unlike other boot sector infectors, the DA'BOYS virus overwrites or rewrites the DOS boot sector. It does not make a copy or move the boot sector to another sector. It will infect all American DOS 5 or DOS 6 boot sectors. It will infect disks in drive A: or B: It works with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M or 2.88M disks. When a disk is booted with the DA'BOYS virus, it will load itself into a "hole" in lower DOS memory. CHKDSK will not show a decrease in available memory. INT 12 will not be moved. The DA'BOYS virus code is written in the "Non-System disk or disk error Replace and press any key when ready" string. But it will display the above message by using the code found on the hard disk DOS boot sector. It will then infect the DOS boot sector (not the partition table) of the hard disk and overwrite the "Non-System ... " text string with it's code. The DA'BOYS virus does not damage any data. It disables COM4. The text string "DA'BOYS" appears in the virus code but is not displayed. The DA'BOYS virus has a companion virus that it works with. The GOLD-BUG virus is also a boot sector infector. It is possible to have a diskette with two boot sector viruses. GOLD-BUG hides the presence of the DA'BOYS virus from the Windows 3.1 startup routine. GOLD-BUG removes the DA'BOYS virus from the INT 13 chain at the start of Windows and restores it when Windows ends. It can be removed from diskettes and hard disks with the DOS SYS command.