hchen@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (H. Chen) (12/06/90)
Dear Netters, Here I have a problem which I hope I can get some help from you. One of my friends is facing a very strange trouble at his computer, a Zenith EaZy PC. (For those who are not familiar this machine, it is a slotfree XT clone, with everything built in its motherboard.) Yesterday afternoon, he found that his machine was unable to boot from the hard disk. So, he used a floppy disk to boot the system. Then, he tried to switch C from A. The system gave him a message saying something like FAT was bad, and C was not available. The problem kept developing after that. He started to hear a different sound from the hard disk. Then, the system gave him another message after a few tries, something like "partition data is lost." A few hours later, the system started to refuse booting by [Ctrl]+ [Alt]+ [Del] for more than one time. Then, about ten minutes later, the machine refused to boot from the floppy drive at any try. That means, the system is completely dead now. I don't know how it is now. At the time I left from that machine, the system could check the built-in Rom, keyboard and the 640k memory. Then the system stopped and gave a message something like "Hard disk error, controller error." The machine is more than two years old now so it is out of warrantee. We may still contact Zenith for help. However, I would like to hear from you if possible before we contact Zenith. I wonder there is some virus attacking the system. But I am not sure. I have never seen the virus that could attack the hardware although I heard of them. I wonder if some of you may have experience the similar situations. Can someone there help we out, at least shot some light on the problem? I don't read the newsgroups regular these days so I prefer email response. If there is enough interesting, I will post an summary. Thank you in advance of any help. Huijie hchen@rose.ucs.indiana.edu