Hi, I had attached my pen-drive to a windows system, which led to loading of a virus that creates a exe file in every folder that you open. Now to get rid of that, I tried deleting the virus from my fedora system, however it just won't go, and moreover it changes the access mode of the pen-drive to read only on every delete attempt. I had tried this before and it worked, but this time it is something different. Maybe the issue is specific to pen-drives, because last time I tried this on a portable hard disk with ntfs.
I have tried overwriting the exe files using the dd command (find -name *\ .exe ./ -exec dd -if=/dev/zero or some text file of={} bs=512 count=some count enough to override the file size \;) to get rid of whatever code is in the virus. After running the above command, ls -l does shows the new attributes of the file in terms of size and modified date etc, however again when I delete the file, the original attributes are restored. Then I tried formatting it, however after a certain point the format fails, because again the access mode changes to read only mode. I then tried overwriting the whole disk with the dd -if=/dev/zero, but that fails too after certain point for the same reason. Now the pen-drive is in a state that even when I attach it to windows, it is accessed in read-only mode and am unable to do anything except for read the data from it. I will send in more details from the logs once I get back to my system. Until then, if anyone has any pointers, please let me know. Regards, Ashish p.s the AVG anti-virus also was not able to delete that virus. _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc