25th April 1999.
In the evening at around 6/7 O' clock, I was scanning my PC's hard disk for the viruses, in the DOS mode. Don't know why but the anti-virus was not working in the windows environment. It found some viruses in the C drive. Catching a virus was not something special those days. So just removed the viruses. Couldn't scan the D drive as it was compressed in windows.
26th April 1999.
I was sleeping. Snehanshu came to my room to wake me up, at around 7:30/8 in the morning. I was not in mood to get up.
Amit came in after 10 mins. Snehanshu said to him,"Computer is not starting up". I woke up in a flash hearing this. He said, 'Computer is not booting up." We rushed to his room, which was on the next floor.
Amit's PC was also kept in Snehanshu's room. Both the PCs were not starting up. Message shown: "Please insert boot disk'. We used a bootable floppy and checked the hard disk for bootable data. Wow, the whole hard disk was clean, as the newly bought one. We did install the OS and other required softwares as the project and the exams were ahead. When we scanned other hard disk (don't remember whose it was) we found the virus. Info as WIN-CIH virus. Gets activated on 26th April.
We informed all the friends in the hostel, who had PCs, not to switch on the PCs ( date change was not possible as it will require PC to start, or it didn't struck our mind). Santosh, who was about to leave for some work, asked us whether any message for anyone? What the message could have been? "Dont boot the PC. Bring the HDD to us", as we had got the Antivirus installer CD which caught the virus. Didn't know if any other has it.
Sumit came to us after some time. He was staying in other hostel nearby. He did get message from Santosh. He told us that he had started the PC at night and his PC didnt boot up. So, Sumit was the first victim among us.
We did put a notice on the door: " Virus removal done here. Re 1/- per file." I guess we had collected 2/3 HDD by then. ;)
While discussing about this we found that the virus would have come from one of the HDD which we used to share the games/picture/softwares.
Amidst this chaos, Mufaddal came to Snehanshu's room. He said that he will bring his HDD. As we already had 2/3 hard disks in queue, we gave him the CD and told him that blah blah is the antivirus software. As he left, while in our discussion we thought 'What if He starts the PC?..... ". One friend and I ran to his room shouting. But in vain. He had already switched on his PC and it was blank now. Some days later, we found that his PC's BIOS was erased by the virus.
Now my PC... I recalled that I had removed the viruses from my C drive. So was not much worried. However we found that it was also..... Checked on Amit's PC, the hard disk was blank as washed. PC was switched on while we were working in the chaos and the virus in the D drive celebrated its birthday by cutting the cake of my hard disk.
Started installing the softwares on my PC too. :(
I have the virus saved somewhere in the floppy. Contact me if any one wants it ;)