Virus Recovery - 90's Style
In the early 90s we were a small, but national and unique[1] hardware maintenance company. I was the software department.
An engineer had RTBed a client's PC with a virus on it, a nasty MBR critter. The drive was going to be written off, none of the tools available could handle it. Knowing this I suggested to engineering I have a pop at it. I didn't want to rebuild the MBR manually and risk getting the parameters wrong. The boss, although he trusted me, was still only just keeping his composure as I formatted the drive, followed by a data recovery. I, of course, had the utmost of confidence. Honest! Job done, and in the future the engineers were "no probs" to clients with virus problems.
Don't try this at home kids!
(Don't crucify me, times have changed!)
[1] I'm not going to say why we were unique, someone might be watching!