I sure screwed up this time. Well anyway, as a little side project to my normal innocent programming, I was working on a virus. It was going quite well (I bet most of you know the rest of the story now ). What the virus did was, when ran, copy itself to a random subdirectory of a random directory with a subdirectory (so it's hard to find), then put it's new location in:
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CUR RENTVERSION\RUN\".
This will allow the virus to execute itself every time Windows is loaded. Normally, after it has installed itself, the virus does nothing except check the clock and close. But if Windows starts and the date is January 31st, the virus deletes the host computer's "win.ini", "system.ini" and "autoexec.bat" files. These files generally contain quite important stuff such as things to run, locations to drivers and some viruses that may have accumuated over the yeards [so it's a good idea to back them up if you use Windows]. Those that didn't guess the story should know it by now.
Well anywho, I decided to test my new virus. So I backed up win.ini, system.ini and autoexec.bat, and ran the program to let it install itself. I then set my date to January 31st.
After a reboot, the virus kicked in and deleted those oh-so-important files whilst displaying its little message: "Gutted". Perfect, it worked! I restored my backups and made some changes to bits the code.
Well I went out to do some shopping (logging off, as always) When I returned, I logged back in. Of course, I forgot to uninstall my virus, and so it ran again (the date still being Jan 31st) and again deleted my files.
This time I had no backups. My files were gone. Bugger. After a reboot the damage was apparent, the resolution was ****ed [ I managed to fix that by reinstalling my graphics card drivers] and I couldn't fix my sound. So I thought, bugger that, my hard drive is full of crap anyway. I'll reinstall.
Remember kids, don't play with fireworks..err important system files.
[101 ways to **** your computer backwards - Brian style. 21/101]