The weirdest bug I ever ran into?

[KingAuther]

W98se, 600mghtz, 128R, 6 gig,

F-Protect, BlackIce, Unofficial updater, DX9...

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I have this floppy, which has a "Starwars a modern paradigm" 34kb EML file, that I can't read, can't bring up properties, can't move, can't delete, can't do Anything with..???

Attempts to open it, or view properties, locks up the PC...

F-Protect (fp win) locks-up in a few seconds when scanning the floppy for bugs...

Various deleter-softwares pop-up failure warnings... Seems nothing can get into this little beastie...

After messing with it for an hour, and seven reboots, I one-time forgot the floppy in A drive on the seventh reboot, and when the PC started to boot, up came a message, in colors, "Starting unOS" the "u" in "unOS" has a little tail on it, like a backward "y".. and the PC stopped loading there...

I removed all other files from the floppy, and still can't do anything with that 34Kb file, which is the appropriate size for a classic bug-file I think...

I'm guessing that maybe F-Protect is blocking it from installing a bug.. but no pop-up warnings happen...

The PC's OS seems to be undamaged by my attempts to open the thing.. but I'll run a few serious checks... Any suggestions on what I should run.. and what to look for in a manual search & destroy?..

I'm wondrin' if this is the file that's been messing up this PC's OS for several months..?

What should I do with this floppy?.. Who be the best person on the planet for to snailmail this frustrating, foolproof, frozen-file, "f'n" floppy to?..

Before I mail it to someone, how do I erase all traces of my private files from this floppy, so the experts Can't read my deleted private files?..

I'm bets some computer wizard is gonna have some fun, with this little monster...

Please advise...

[Tarun]

Just trash it. You can also take it apart and take a lighter to the film for added security and some pyromaniac fun.

[Aegis]

It's a corrupt file apparently. I have a few files like that on my system. Can't delete it no matter how low-level I get. I even went into DOS and WinPE to try and delete it. With no open handles, I still don't see how a file could block any delete attempts, so I just passed it off as corrupt.

[LLXX]

Nothing strange at all, just physically damaged media.

Google 'file recovery' or similar queries if you want to try to recover the contents of that file.

[HyperHacker]

Floppies do that all the time.

[JoeMSFN]

micro nOS eh?

I'd open the command prompt and do

format a: /u /autotest

assuming a: is the floppy letter in question.

See if there are any bad blocks (or perhaps track 0) unusuable. Yeah, that would eliminate the "challenge" of deleting the file, but it would also remove the question of bad media.

The other thing, if you're downright curious what's in the file... FAT is a well known, with luck reasonably documented file structure.

Perhaps you can use a "sector editor" to read the contents of the FAT, then with that figure out which sector to view to see the file directly.

I tried doing a search for what OS that might be and discovered a wonderful world of stuff... none of which lead me to what your boot floppy might be. Alas... a longer list of bookmarks and a good hour plus on another tangent.