Just a quick note to thank you for your miraculous CIH utility. I really do appreciate and commend you for your commitment to ensuring EVERYONE's data will be restored correctly, especially at your own expense. This is UNHEARD OF in today's society, making your company truly unique in this competitive environment.

At any rate, the wait for you to perfect your product was definitely worth it. You came through as advertised, as my hard drive was brought back to 100% restoration, saving me ENDLESS hours of reconstruction. I had nearly 12.7 GB's full, including extremely important files, without adequate backup (Shame on me - I HAVE LEARNED!). I decided not to use other products that I had read in the newsgroups that had success with CIH'ed HD's, because I felt much more comfortable with the anticipated quality and specific dedication of your utility to the CIH virus. The cost of commercial restore software (Lost & Found?) was never really an issue. I have felt right along that you should consider, and have a legitimate right and a good market, to be compensated for your time. Time is money, and you saved me a FORTUNE!!

Again, your generosity is appreciated far more than you probably imagine (especially in my case), and I will be sure to spread the word. You obviously understood how thousands of people felt the morning of April 26th, and did a great job of reversing our/my feeling of desperation. If you reconsider a charge for this service down the road, please keep my email on file as one to contact. Thanks again!

Chris
Connecticut

Oh, you wonderful, wonderful creature you!!
I'm writing this using the very same hardrive that didn't work at all about fifteen minutes ago, and as far as I can see, everything is back to what it should be!! You're amazing, and a special thank you for bearing with me even though my case at first didn't resolve quite as easily as others. And, if you ever need some beta-tester, a kidney, anything, feel free to drop me a line!

Mattias

This is an electronic hug. There is absolutely no way I can thank you enough. Photos, letters, bookmarks, our diary (my wife has written a diary from her pregnancy with our not yet born, first child, and the back-up disc malfunctioned!), my projects, everything is back. You are the true wizard.

My wife Nina and I are truly grateful for your work to help us, and others.

Best wishes
Tor Erik and Nina

(PS! 153 files were infected by the CIH-virus)

Steve,

It appears that fix-cih.exe has recovered everything on my 6 gig. Hard Drive. (My business and personal computer). Now I will work on my daughters computer that also went down on 4/26.

I had saved via individual backups my main business data. (Data base of inventory, complete accounting and checking accounts for 6 retail business.) Most of this was within a week of being current. I was able to load the software and backups into another computer to get the business `back in business'.

And I thought that I had a virus program that had been auto up-dating via back web. Well it wasn't and I guess in the end it is my fault for not making sure that I had up-to-date virus protection. I sure will from now on.

But what I was able to recover with your program was all the things--big and small — that had importance to me — like my contact book and passwords for a multitude of services and all of my carefully cropped, enhanced and indexed digital personal pictures. My granddaughter at age 2 and my mom's picture on her wedding day.

Steve, I just wanted you to know that you have helped people to recover more that bytes and files and data.You have helped people recover some things that even more important — irreplaceable memories.

Thank you.

Please feel free to use this `Thank you' on you web site on in any manner you choose.

Phil

I would have danced around jumping up and down and screamed if it wasn't for my kids and girlfriend is asleep - but maybe it is worth waking them up... It looks that everything is back - so now I will have to disinfect the disk... Thank you Steve. I really must say that You ARE - THE MAN - I am SO grateful that my eyes are full of tears :) and thank you again and again and again...

/Jörgen - the forever grateful

After waiting three weeks for your fix-cih program, I have to say, you are the MAN! Not only every thing I had on my hard drive was recovered, I was able to boot the computer again (Windows 98) from the same hard drive without any problem! I think you did an amazing job at this since some companies have similar products that they sell from $60 to $500, and after they spend almost an hour analyzing your hard drive, their recovery isn't even 100%.

I had Windows 2000 installed on another drive, and after fix-cih was done and I rebooted the computer, Windows 2000 recognized the drive and ran CHKDSK on it, and that finalized your fix.

I ran virus scan on my drive and found 450 .exe files infected with CIH! unbelievable.

Any ways, thank you very much for all your effort and good luck with future projects.

Sincerely,

Arash

Well done. I ran the program and it worked flawlessly. The computer that I used to re-build it isn't the final machine, as I concluded that virus and W95 versions were going to cause me a lot of headaches. Norton Anti-virus was installed on the rebuild machine and complained about virus-like activity.

The curious thing was Windows95 reported after rebooting that the system had not been shutdown properly, and needed to run Scandisk, so Ok. It found a 2Meg lost chain, which I assumed was from the the virus related crash.

Norton Anti-virus found 158 infected files on the drive and fixed all of them, this has yet to be confirmed. The "live update" program runs on the office computers, once a month. My at home computer is about two weeks behind them for updates and couldn't repair twenty or so files on my alternate drive.

Again well done and thank you. Wow only 19KB.

Regards

David

Steve

Thanks for all the work you did on this great recovery program. Our company had purchased two computers from at the same time and before I could get anti virus programs loaded, they booth crashed. Unfortunately I played around with mine until I got fed up and reformatted and reloaded. But I later remembered your company and checked it out. Had I waited I would have been able to recover two hard drives but my impatience won out on the first one. Thanks again for the great job. I must say that your work on this problem has restored some of my faith in people. It is wonderful to know there still are people in the world who care and try to help out others.

Thanks

Michael

Thank you so much for helping me, and everyone else who was hit by the CIH virus!

It's been really comforting to have been able to come to your web site during the process of your writing this program, and see how my computer-recovery was getting nearer every day, as your program was taking shape! Fix-cih is truly a "life-saver" for a lot of people!

Though risking to sound like I were at a funeral, I want to THANK YOU FOR THE MEMORIES! By that I'm referring to all the great memories, stored away on my hard drive, which - without your help - would have been lost forever! Steve Gibson - You're the Man!!!

Another Newly Found Friend,
Carl
Sweden

Too bad I don't have a camera. You missed my dancing through the room when I saw my computer's boot screen. (Luckily, there were no witnesses.)

I had not managed to recover my data through a month of hard work between a friend and myself (both cs graduates) and decided that I was going to format the thing and start anew. I booted from a clean DOS diskette, typed format and... Nothing... Fdisk? It opened and crashed. I tried everything I could think of and the nice Sony technician (I wouldn't be surprised if I knew them all by name by now) told me "It's a 3rd party problem, we can't do anything for you" (Read: Unless you pay us some more). With dire thoughts of going to find a screwdriver to open my desktop and plug my laptop's trashed HD on it as a slave (but also to do a lot of exotic tortures with said screwdriver to the guy who wrote the virus) and try the procedure again, I went online to check out if anyone had the same problem, ended up on your page...

And my laptop is up and running.

Now, if you were named something else, I'd be ecstatic enough to say I'd name my firstborn after you... But then, it's the thought that counts, isn't it? ;)

Thanks again, I'll finally have a good night's sleep.

Zoi

With your latest addition, Fix-cih perfectly reconstructed my drive !

I have just disinfected over 200 executables on my system from CIH and this concludes a nightmare which started one month ago with the erasure BOTH of my bios and of the HD ...

Thank you again, I was very impressed not only by the extremely professional work you made with fix-cih but also by your kindness and the speed with which you proposed a solution to the difficulties fix-cih was having with my hd.

All the best,
Jost

PS: I also noticed the other improvements you made to fix-cih: fix-cih recognized correctly also my SCSI hd with Linux, showing the correct drive geometry and indicating it as GOOD.

hi steve,
   just wanted to thank you for your efforts and the fine piece of software. using release 5, i recovered a 4gb drive with 2 partitions in 20 minutes!! :) awesome work

michael

It worked 100% well. I have tried many other programs, but yours is the only one that worked. I'm so thankful. You are a genius. You should be nominated for the Nobel Recovery Price!!

I shall never forget what you have done for me.

John B - Norway

I think it ended up working in LBA mode. I ran the program and the BIOS reported a 3.2 Gig drive...yeah!!! The program ran flawlessly and everything was back to normal. I ran my Norton virus scanner on it and found 281 infected files.

So it's back up and running. Thanks a lot for all the help and the FREE software!! You have certainly gone above and beyond to help all the people that were struck. I will definitely recommend you and your software to anyone with problems from now on.

Again, thanks a million!
Bob

Dear Steve:

IT WORKS!! I would like to say thanks for offering this hard drive recovery utility. It took about 1.5H for it to reverse the damage that the CIH virus had done. After running a virus scan (using an updated DAT file) it found 171 infected files. Now all I have to do is clean them!

Thanks,
Ivan

I finally got a chance to try the different version of FIX-CIH and it worked great. Everything is back to normal. Thank you. Your help and personal attention put my life back to normal.

Scott

My son's computer got this cih virus he has a 6 gig hard drive that is fully full. Your program fixed it perfectly. The computer is a Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8160. It has the PHOENIX BIOS 4.0 release 6.0.b date 09/02/97. I called ZDTV/THESCREENSAVER show to thank you on the air, but they had no time left. So my son Johnny and I THANK YOU AGAIN.

Jack
Carteret N.J.

Thanks again for all you did, you have continued to bolster my support for your products. I can't say I have ever had better support, and that's even for packages our company has spent $$$$ for.

Adric

Hi Steve

GOOD NEWS! It worked!!

I cannot thank you enough for all of the effort you put into recovering my data. All of your work is greatly appreciated. I ran the program and it went past where it had always stopped. Each time I ran fix-cih, it took about 15 mins. This time, I waited the 15 mins and it continued! There was only an additional few seconds on the whole process. Is there anything I can do for u in return?

Thank you so incredibly much for all of your support over the last week.

Good luck in whatever other projects you come across and have fun!

Thanks again

Clayton

"A Critical Error Prevents Us From Proceeding! The apparent beginning of this first partition does not fall upon the start of a track. This is odd in the extreme, though not at all impossible if the BIOS's sector count has changed. But on the principle of "Better safe than sorry", this freeware utility must decline drive recovery."

I have a 1.3 Gigabytes disk with only one partition in FAT32.

Could you please help me ?

Thanks

Subject: It's wonderful !!!

Hi Steve,

I have tried the version of FIX-CIH you sent me. It has perfectly done its job! It was a great pleasure for me when I saw that Windows was booting normally. You can really be glad of what you are doing. Thank you for this great freeware. I think it will help many people.

Seb

TELCO TELEFONIA

Version 4.1 worked perfectly. I had a Fujitsu MP30A 4.3 Gb drive running Windows 98 that the program restored exactly the way it was. I then found 203 infected files, including systray.exe and taskmon.exe. The virus then worked its way into the exe file for the virus scanner, so I was reduced to command line cleaning of the entire machine.

But as I said, the program worked great. Thanks for all your help.
Feel free to post this.
--Padraic

I really do !!!

I too was struck badly by this &%&#&^$#* CIH-Virus, and I too had only planned to make a backup but never got to it. Thanks to you all my data is back. I don't know how to thank you, but "you're forever bookmarked" and I told everyone I know about you. I especially appreciate the fact that you are one of a few who didn't use other people's misery to make a quick buck selling crap to desperate victims of an irresponsible psychopath.

Keep up the good work......

Bas
The Netherlands

It worked just fine. Everything looks Ok. I'm now in the process of killing virus.

Thanks,
Claudio

Hi Steve

Just a quick note to thank you for the fantastic CIH recovery program. Without your help I would have lost a lot of valuable data as well as having to buy a new motherboard! It was a frustrating few weeks waiting for the working version to arrive, but your diary gave me hope and kept me going. When it arrived it worked first time. Windows 98 got a bit confused with my new motherboard but then it's what I've come to expect. Ever thought of giving Microsoft a helping hand? A course on how to write compact, bug free code perhaps!

Once again many thanks for all your hard work and effort. If you decide to charge for your work on the CIH recovery project or if there is anything I can do for you in the future, please get in touch.

Yours, Paul
Englishman in Norway.

The fix-cih really saved my life. I had countless hours of work that would have been lost if it weren't for you guys at GRC.

Thank you very much again.

Dirk