Monkey virus is one of the common boot sector viruses that can render your Windows unbootable. The article discusses few technical aspects, prevention measures, and some ways to Recover Windows by removing Monkey virus.
The virus retains a peculiar characteristic and spreads only from floppy disks, which can further infect the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your hard drive. The virus uses the stealth technology to hide its presence. Since it encrypts the original data of your partition table, when you boot the Windows-based computer from a floppy disk, the system fails to recognize the hard drive (’Invalid drive specification’ error occurs).
However, when you boot from the infected hard drive, the partition table is decrypted and everything appears to be normal. This occurs because Monkey virus replaces the MBR code of hard drive by its own code and moves the MBR to the third sector of the hard drive.
Precaution:
If your Windows computer is infected from Monkey virus, never attempt to run commands like, /fixmbr or fdisk /mbr etc. Doing so can damage your partition table and MBR badly, instead of fixing it.
Do not use any disk editor that claims to restore the MBR back to its original position. This might get successful in removing the virus case, but Windows cannot boot after this.
When you use an anti-virus software to remove Monkey virus, make sure that it is able to decrypt the partition table. Ignoring this can result in complete data loss from hard drive.
How to Remove Monkey Virus?
Apply any of the below measures, whichever is suitable, to get rid of Monkey virus:
Restore MBR and partition table from an infection-free backup
If possible, locate the original zero track, decrypt the information, and move it back to the original place
Use an appropriate anti-virus software
Repartition the hard drive, reformat the logical drives, and restore the lost data from a previous backup
If in case, you find your data backup invalid or absent, use a Windows Data Recovery tool. These special utilities can scan your Windows disk and Recover Windows data safely.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software is a comprehensive utility designed to recover and restore lost data from Windows based disks. This Windows Data Recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003, and 2000 and features advanced options like, disk cloning, disk imaging, RAW file recovery, and others.