lodzins@pilot.njin.net (Dean Lodzinski) (03/30/91)
A friend of mine has an IBM clone (not sure of the brand). He had his
system working fine. He has 2 hard drives and one floppy. He turned
off his system, then turned it back on at a later time and when he
booted up the system didn't recognize the hard drives, either one of
them. The floppy worked fine. If anyone could give me a idea of
where to look or suggest, I would appreciate it. All I could think of
is somehow his CMOS configuration got messed up or his hard drive
controller screwed up. Anything else? Any comments/suggestions would
be appreciated.
Dean
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Dean Lodzinski dean_l@turbo.kean.edu, lodzins@pilot.njin.net,
47 Mercury Circle dean_l@support.kean.edu or D.LODZINSKI on GEnie
South Amboy, NJ Dean Lodzinski on Hologram Inc., FNET Node 133,
08879-2464 USA at 908/727-1914 (1200/2400/9600)
Dean Lodzinski on Fidonet at 1:107/371 or 1:107/323frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) (04/04/91)
A corrupted CMOS is a possibility, but that should be easy to check just by running the SETUP utility of that particular machine. A damaged controller is also a possible explanation, but I suspect it might be just a corrupted partition boot table. If the last two bytes of track 0, head 0, sector 1 are not AA55, the BIOS will not attempt to boot from the hard disk, and it will appear not to exist. This may happen when some program overwrites the PBR, sometimes by accident, but many Trojans and viruses do it as well. The partition boot record is not needed until the next time you start up the machine, so the symptoms would be just as you described. In fact, this just happeded to my virus-test machine - for the 5th time. My suggestion in your case - run NDD, (Norton 4.5, not 5.0) -frisk Fridrik Skulason University of Iceland | Technical Editor of the Virus Bulletin (UK) | Reserved for future expansion E-Mail: frisk@rhi.hi.is Fax: 354-1-28801 |