Lazarus (is NOT a virus) - Amiga Virus Encyclopedia
VIRUS HELP TEAM Amiga Antivirus Website
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Amiga Virus Encyclopedia
Lazarus - NOT a virus
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Lazarus is NOT a virus or a trojan, as people think or believe.
In the first Amiga OS releases, Commodore included a standard floppy disk recovery
utility called 'DiskDoctor.' It's purpose was to recover files from mangled floppy
disks. Unfortunately, this utility worked only with AmigaDOS standard disks. A major
fault was that it did not save the recovered data on different disks, rather it saved
the info on the original and performed it's operations directly on the original. It
wrote on original disks and destroyed non-AmigaDOS disks (mainly autobooting games) by
overwriting their bootblock. 'DiskDoctor' renamed recovered disks to 'Lazarus'.
File excerpt from diskdoctor:
726d6174 202d2053 6f727279 210a0000 rmat - Sorry!...
074c617a 61727573 30556e61 626c6520 .Lazarus0Unable
746f2077 72697465 20746f20 726f6f74 to write to root
These features were undocumented and led to an Amiga users believeing that there was a
computer virus with the name 'Lazarus' Virus, whose final purpose was to make disks
unreadable and renaming it with that name. Third-party developers released data
recovery programs such as DiskSalv, which was more often used to validate Amiga
filesystems on hard disk partitions.
You should delete 'DiskDoctor' from your disk and never use it again.
Try and use DiskSalv instead.