Buy a new harddrive, get a virus

[Ralf Maximus]

Unbelievable.  Via MaximumPC comes the news that certain Maxtor harddrives sold since August 2007 come pre-installed with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus.

It's always nice to get something for free, but Maxtor... you're trying too hard.

[cranioscopical]

Not the first occurrence, either, apparently.

If only reports like these would slow down the rate of North America's (the world's?) increasing dependence on Chinese manufacturing.

[OkRob]

I've got one of the 3200's that I bought in September. So far no problems with it. It's actually a very nice and fast drive. I've ran a few virus scans on it per the Seagate website and it appears to be clean, so I think I got a good one. 

[freznel]

Anyone in DC who's gotten the one of *bad* ones>

[Deozaan]

Don't you have to format these drives before using them? How do they keep the virus?

[lanux128]

i remember one time when i returned a defective hard-disk to be replaced by a "brand-new" one which contained accounts reports generated by a SAP program..

[Laughing Man]

Don't you have to format these drives before using them? How do they keep the virus?

-Deozaan (November 13, 2007, 12:13 AM)

If I recall, you just plug them in and they're usually preformatted to NTFS. Though I usually format them before using them. Plus the drive doesn't always work.. like the externals, I had to reformat it before it would work properly.

[Ehtyar]

Maybe this explains where all that missing space actually goes.... 

Ehtyar.

[Ralf Maximus]

TOP TEN EXPLANATIONS WHY YOUR NEW HARDDRIVE CAME WITH A VIRUS

10. You say virus, we say "free marketing".

9. Manufacturer ran out of free promotional trialware and grabbed the first thing they had laying around.

8. "Welcome to our new disk installation & formatting wizard."

7. We forgot to set the "bad sector" flag for the boot sector.

6. We've always shipped viruses on our products, but this is the first time a working drive actually made it into the hands of a customer.

5. It's part of our new SmartDataReorganizer[tm] feature.

4. It's a communist plot.  No really, the chinese intelligence services stick these things on products intended for western use and the data's sucked up and phoned home and-- no really, the article even mentions this!  Where are you going...?

3. It's not a virus -- it's the world's smallest Linux distribution.

2. To optimize drive performance, the virus actually eats every 3rd byte before it's written to disk.

1. Clean-room technician forgot to wash his hands.

[f0dder]

i remember one time when i returned a defective hard-disk to be replaced by a "brand-new" one which contained accounts reports generated by a SAP program..

-lanux128 (November 13, 2007, 12:23 AM)

Hm, I've never seen a harddrive company that says you get a brand new drive, the ones I've dealt with has "refurbished" written in the fine print. But it does suck.

Infected disks & peripherals is nothing new anyway, it's happened a number of times. Yet another reason to turn off sucky autorun.

[OkRob]

Don't you have to format these drives before using them? How do they keep the virus?

-Deozaan (November 13, 2007, 12:13 AM)

My Maxtor Basics Personal Solutions 3200 is a USB external drive. It did not require formatting and actually I never thought about that before using it. They may make the same model in an internal drive but I don't know if they do or not.