This is a hoax.
Every so often during the year these "notices" come up.

Number One Way to Know a Notice is a Hoax -

     You cannot start a virus by opening a text file.

 Virus work by residing in .EXE or .COM files,
 files that control something.

Number Two Way to Know a Notice is a Hoax -

     Viruses CANNOT physically destroy a hard drive,
     believe it or not.

 The only way a virus can physically destroy a hard drive
 is to rewrite the READ/WRITE cycles for the hard drive
 to some incredible amount of cycles. If this is done,
 and you sit there without any regard to the fact that
 you PC is taking 5 hours to read a 1K text file, you
 deserve to have your hard drive destroyed (dripping sarcasm).

 A virus that "destroys" a hard drive doesn't do anything
 to the hard drive at all. It rewrites or erases the hard
 drive driver program. This "essentially" destroys the hard
 drive to the user depending upon what's in it, but the hard
 drive "I guarantee" is physically still ok.

 I have had this happen to me. I had a 1.2Gb drive that
 suddenly was only 500Mb large. That should have been a
 key piece of info for me. DOS can only handle a drive
 without a driver up to, you guessed it, 500Mb. I reloaded
 the driver (yes I lost the info on my drive) and I still
 use that hard drive today. The gentleman who helped me
 chuckled at the fact that I didn't hand in my drive to
 a parts seller. He'd just take the hard drive, reload
 the driver, then sell it back to someone else.

Don't be fooled into these virus notices.

Anyway, here's some sites about virus's

Computer Incident Advisory Capability
 http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHome.html
 http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/
 http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/ToolsDOSVirus.html
 http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/SecurityTools.html

Also the CIAC has this to say about receiving a warning -

What to Do When You Receive a Warning
=====================================

Upon receiving a warning, you should examine its PGP signature 
to see that it is from a real response team or antivirus 
organization. To do so, you will need a copy of the PGP 
software and the public signature of the team that sent the 
message. The CIAC signature is available from the CIAC web 
server at:

http://ciac.llnl.gov
************************************************************
If there is no PGP signature, see if the warning includes 
the name of the person submitting the original warning. 
Contact that person to see if he/she really wrote the warning 
 and if he/she really touched the virus. If he/she is passing 
on a rumor or if the address of the person does not exist or 
if there is any questions about theauthenticity or the warning, 
do not circulate it to others. Instead, send the warning to 
your computer security manager or incident response team and 
let them validate it. When in doubt, do not send it out to 
the world. Your computer security managers and the incident
response teams teams have experts who try to stay current 
on viruses and their warnings.

************************************************************
  -------------------------------------------------------
  The comments and opinions stated herein are mine alone,
          and do not reflect those of my employer.
   -------------------------------------------------------
************************************************************

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