Hi,

I have been having intermintant problems with corrupt downloads on my computer. What is strange is that i just wiped my computer (I formatted the drive using the windows XP set up disk). Someone sudjested that I have a mbr virus, yet I have heard that the only mbr viruses out there cause you computer to not boot at all, and mine boots just fine. I have run my antivirus and spyware programs and they have come up with nothing.

Is this a motherboard virus? If not any ideas?

The problem only becomes apparent at random intervals, so there is no way to really check for it except to wait and see if it shows up again. I pinged apple all night and got almost no packet loss (like 2 packets out of 10000 were lost) so I don't think that it is that.

Thanks for the help!

Can you describe the problem? What is your PC doing wrong?

Is this a motherboard virus? If not any ideas?

I know apple do make some splendid little machines, but really, they're not that good as to pick up an mbr virus and boot full stop. You pick up one of those, you're never going to have to ask.

When you say corrupt downloads, are we talking from a p2p or bit-torrent network here?

Seems more likely it would be a problem with RAM...

the only way i know of to get rid of a MBR virus is to download the drive manufacturers fomatting and partitioning software and repartitioning your disk with it. after partitioning you must format the partitions.

edit
as to the "motherboard virus", motherboards do not get viruses, the only thing remotely resembling a motherboard virus is a CMOS virus.

Indeed, my assumption would be a RAM issue too.

You usually find what is commonly refered to as a Cyclic Redundancy Check Error or CRC Error for short, which usually occurs when the Systems RAM has corrupted. I'm not that familiar with iMac's but I gather it's the same fundamentals.

If a region of the RAM is corrupt then the system will appear to have random errors that can alter with each boot, this is down to how the system loads up and where it loads things too. Obviously loading to an area with an error is going to corrupt the data.

There might be some testing tools you can find for download to check your RAM and maybe even a way to tell your system which regions of RAM to not use in the future, this will lower the amount available but work around the problem.