AVDisk 9.2e =========== System requirements: - 80386 or better processor - MS-DOS 4 or better - for NTFS partitions: NTFSDOS from http://www.sysinternals.com 1. The purpose of this program ------------------------------ AVDisk will help you create a set of rescue disks. Booting from clean rescue disks is necessary when your computer becomes infected with a memory resident virus. By booting from a floppy, the virus won't be activated and therefore won't be able to install itself in memory where it could otherwise interfere with the scanning and cleaning process. Please note that no virus scanner is 100% fail-safe, no matter how diligently you update it and regardless of what the scanner manufacturer tells you. It is of paramount importance that you practice what is called "safe hex", i.e. that you follow a set of safe computing rules. The importance of safe hex cannot be stressed enough. Competent and free information about viruses and virus protection can be found here: http://www.claymania.com/nav-map.html 2. What is on the rescue disks? ------------------------------- The first floppy contains the FreeDOS operating system, an MS-DOS clone. A variable number of additional floppies contain the anti-virus program. 3. Which anti-virus programs are supported? ------------------------------------------- Currently, the DOS versions of the following anti-virus programs are supported: - F-Prot (http://www.f-prot.com) - AVPDOS32 (http://www.avp.ch) - McAfee ScanPM (http://www.mcafee.com) - ESET NOD32 (http://www.nod32.com) - EZ Antivirus (formerly known as Inoculate IT PE) (http://www.my-etrust.com) (The DOS program is part of the Win9x/NT/2000 download) - Grisoft AVG (http://www.grisoft.com) (The DOS program is part of the Win9x download) - Dr. Web (http://www.sald.com) - Trend Micro PC-Cillin (http://www.trend.com) (The DOS program is part of the Win9x download) - Sophos AntiVirus (Sophos Sweep) (http://www.sophos.co.uk) The following anti-virus programs are not supported: - H+BEDV's AntiVir The freeware DOS scanner is highly inflexible and cannot scan entire drives. - Norton Antivirus The DOS version is very large and requires an inordinate number of floppies. Please note that NO Windows program is supported, simply because it's not possible to boot Windows from floppy. If there is an anti-virus program for which you think we should add support, drop us a note if the program meets the following requirements: - There must be a DOS version of the program. - It must not be too severely crippled. - It should not be too large. - We must be able to obtain a functional copy of the program in order to add support. 4. Contents of the AVDisk zip file ---------------------------------- The AVDisk archive should contain the following files: Name purpose ------------ --------------------------------------------------------- SETUP.BAT Run this program to install AVDisk AVDISK.TXT This file INSTALL.DAT The actual installation program, do NOT run this directly UNZIP_A.DAT An unzipper, there is no need for you to run it directly UZLICENS.TXT The license file for the UnZip program LANGUAGE.RES Language file DATA.ZIP The actual AVDisk program, do NOT unpack this directly NTFSDOS.EXE A dummy NTFSDOS.EXE file, do NOT delete this file! PGPSIG.ZIP PGP signatures QMS.EXE Memory scanner QMS.INI Configuration file for QMS.EXE 5. Installation --------------- In order to install AVDisk, please run the SETUP.BAT file. First, a memory scan will be performed to ensure that no virus is lurking in memory. Please note that the program scans for DOS viruses only. If the memory scanner reports a virus, do not panic and prepare the boot disks on another computer which you know to be clean. Do not take drastic measures such as formatting. After the memory scan the installation program will be launched. It will search for supported anti-virus programs on your computer and then ask you to select one of them. Boot disks will be created for the program that you select here. If you want to create several sets of boot disks for different scanners, you must run the installation once for each scanner. Then you will be prompted to select an instance of the NTFSDOS program. Please take a look at section 9, NTFS. Please note that you MUST select an instance of this program even if you do not plan to scan NTFS drives. Finally, you will be asked to choose the desired keyboard layout for the boot disks and the language for the actual AVDisk program. The installation program will create a subdirectory named AVDISK in the directory where the anti-virus program that you chose resides. It will copy all necessary files to that subdirectory and run avdisk.exe. If everything works fine, you can delete the original AVDisk archive that you downloaded, and the files that it contained unless you want to run the installation process again for another virus scanner. Please note that for each virus scanner for which you want to create boot disks there must be a separate instance of AVDisk. 6. Creating rescue disks ------------------------ Under normal circumstances, AVDisk will be invoked automatically by the setup program and should be able to create the rescue disk set on its own. Just follow the on-screen instructions guiding you through the creation process. However, in some cases it might be necessary to launch avdisk.exe separately, for example if you lose your boot disks and want to create a new set. In order to launch avdisk.exe directly, you can click on it in the Windows Explorer or run it on the command line in a DOS window. All command line parameters can be viewed by specifying the help switch: avdisk.exe /? You will be shown a list of all available parameters and short descriptions on their use as well as the languages AVDisk can speak and all available keyboard definitions for the floppy disk set (see below for usage notes). All parameters can be mixed. You may also specify the keyboard layout for the rescue disks on the command line: avdisk.exe /keydef:xx where xx is either a "long" language name or a short keyboard code, as in the following list: us : English gr : German fr : French it : Italian sp : Spanish More country codes may be supported. Check "avdisk.exe /?" for a full list of all supplied keyboard layouts. However, not all of them could be tested and can be guaranteed to work. So you can e.g. either use "avdisk.exe /keydef:fr" or "avdisk.exe /keydef:French" to set the keyboard layout to French. The current list of supported keyboard layouts can be viewed using the help switch (see above). If no keyboard language is given, avdisk.exe will default to one matching the language it currently "speaks". Additionally avdisk.exe supports the following command line switches: /forceupdate Forces AVDisk to update disks even if the AVDisk versions do not match. In that case AVDisk does not care whether there is already something on the floppy. /tempdir:xyz Instructs avdisk.exe to use the directory xyz as the temporary directory. The default is the directory specified by the %temp% environment variable. /setlanguage:xyz Switches the language AVDisk "speaks". If, for some reason, you want to change the program language after the initial setup, use this switch. Currently, you may replace xyz with either ENGLISH, FRENCH or GERMAN. Do not mix this up with the /keydef switch, which only controls the keyboard layout of the rescue disk. For a current list of all supported languages, use the help switch. /verbose By default, avdisk.exe will tell you not much concerning what is going on "behind the scene". If you use the /verbose switch, avdisk.exe will show all status messages on the screen. The entries in the log file (avdisk.log) behave accordingly. In case you want to report a problem during disk creation, please use the /verbose switch and send us the log file along with your problem description. This will make troubleshooting easier. IMPORTANT NOTE: you should conduct a test run immediately after you created the boot disks to see if they work. It would be unfortunate for you to discover that they don't work when you most need them... 7. Notes and hints ------------------ If you encounter problems with the installation program, you can try to specify the "safe" command line parameter when running setup.bat (without the quotes), for example: setup.bat safe In that case, install.exe will search for anti-virus programs only on drive C: and it will "behave" more cautiously. Though in most cases there should be no problems. The installation program might search for anti-virus programs on CD-ROMs under Windows, however in such a case it is not possible to choose an anti-virus program located on a CD-ROM since CD-ROMs cannot be written to. 8. Reporting a bug ------------------ 8.1 Known problems ------------------ Some Windows 98 users might experience hangs of AVDisk when it copies files to floppy. At this time, it looks like this problem is Windows-related. If it occurs on your system, try to use the program in pure DOS mode. This should always work. As AVDisk uses FreeDOS (which is still in beta phase) as its disk operating system, you might experience that not all AV programs work perfectly -- some may hang your machine in certain situations or refuse to work at all. Since FreeDOS is not yet 100% MS-DOS- compatible, there is not much we can do about this than wait for a newer version of the FreeDOS kernel. This makes it even more important that you test your newly created floppy disk set. 8.2 Send email -------------- If you discover a bug, make sure you have the latest version of the program as the bug may already have been fixed. See "Credits" for the address of the official AVDisk home page. If the bug still exists in the most recent version, send email to quantensprung@gmx.net and fbonroy@mail.dotcom.fr Bugs in QMS must be reported to Ralph Roth at RalphRoth@gmx.de Please describe your problem and be as specific as possible: - which version of AVDisk are you using? - which part of AVDisk is causing trouble (installation, AVDisk itself, the boot disks)? - which operating system are you using (name, version)? - describe the symptoms and the circumstances under which the bug occurs - if applicable, send the log file avdisk.exe produces (avdisk.log in the AVDISK subfolder of your anti-virus program) along with your mail. This makes troubleshooting easier. If the problem can be reproduced, use the /verbose switch on avdisk.exe to produce a detailed logfile. Of course, you may also report spelling and grammar mistakes. ;-) 9. NTFS ------- DOS anti-virus programs are usually not capable of scanning NTFS volumes. NTFS is a special file system used by Windows NT, 2000 and XP. It is not used by Windows 95, 98 or ME, so if you have one of those you need not worry about NTFS. Please note that Windows NT, 2000 and XP do not necessarily use NTFS either, although they probably do on most computers. In order to be able to scan NTFS partitions, you need to obtain a special driver called NTFSDOS from http://www.sysinternals.com. Uncompress the ZIP archive and run the AVDisk installation procedure. When asked to select an instance of NTFSDOS, choose the one you just downloaded and not the one that is shipped with AVDisk. Please note that this is a free version that allows for read access only. You will not be able to disinfect infected files. 10. Credits ---------- The official AVDisk homepage is http://www.avdisk.org The official QMS homepage is http://come.to/rose_swe The following people are involved in AVDisk: Digital56k - wrote the original AVDisk batch files Deniz Oezmen - wrote SearchRD and the current avdisk.exe Steven Craik - worked out AVPDOS32 support for AVDisk Frederic Bonroy - wrote install.exe and this help file Axel Pettinger - worked out support for NAI ScanPM Ozzie Ostrich - helped inventing the update mode for W2K Ralph Roth - wrote QMS and ENVINFO Clay - tested AVDisk with EZ Antivirus Robert Green - wrote the CSFD system used on the startup floppy Uzi Paz - solved a keyboard layout problem The Condor - merciless beta tester Art Kopp - intensive beta testing and bug reporting 11. Info-ZIP ------------ This AVDisk distribution contains a slightly modified version of Info-ZIP's UnZip utility (called UNZIP_A.DAT or UNZIP_A.EXE). This is NOT an official release of the Info-ZIP team and therefore not supported by them. If you have any questions regarding this program, please contact the AVDisk folks (cf. section 8.2 of this document). If you want to use UnZip or Zip for your own purposes, we strongly recommend getting your own unmodified copy at http://www.info-zip.org (it's freeware). You may find the license text for UnZip in the file UZLICENS.TXT that came with this archive. 12. Legal drivel --------------- - This program is freeware and you are encouraged to distribute it. You may NOT charge money for the distribution of AVDisk. - You may NOT modify any of the files included in the AVDisk archive and you may NOT distribute modified files. - You may NOT distribute AVDisk together with malicious software of any kind. This includes joke programs and virus construction kits as well as virus creation documentation. - You may distribute only the entire AVDisk archive; you may NOT distribute single files. Likewise, you may NOT add files to the AVDisk zip file. - You agree to use this program at your own risk. It has been tested thoroughly and contains no potentially dangerous code; however malfunction can never be completely ruled out. - The included program "qms.exe" is licensed for use in conjunction with this software distribution only. You may not use it otherwise or even distribute it without the AVDisk package. For detailed information, see the QMS website (section 10).