Dan,

It seems  the harddrive is going out.  Probably, everything on the
harddrive is gone as well.  Hope she doesn't have very crucial
information stored on it.  Unless you can find a replacement for the
harddrive, the computer probably is useless as  well.

There is one more way that might save the harddrive.  That is low-level
format the harddrive.  By doing this, everything on the harddrive is
guarantee to be lost.  Sometimes you can perform the format from inside
the BIOS ( or CMOS), or from individual program.  If after the low-level format
and all of the wired thing still happens, the harddrive is hopeless.

good luck,
Constance


On Mon, 3 Aug 1998 18:52:56 -0500
Dan Hughes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> My friend has a very old Zenith 286 computer with a stock 40mb hard drive
> (sorry, don't know the brand or specs).
>
> This computer has a menu that is fired up by the autoexec.bat, so when
> she turns it on she has a list of categories.  She clicks on a category
> for a pulldown menu, then clicks on her choice.
>
> This weekend, her menu came up when she booted, but when she went to the
> pulldown menus most of them were empty.  When she tried to click on
> WordPerfect she got an error message that begin "plink 86" and then said
> the requested file did not exist.  Has anyone ever seen this before?
> None of my references list it.  (The message was longer, but she didn't
> write it down).
>
> I went into her DOS, and several programs were indeed gone.  In a couple
> of cases, directories had somehow been replaced by empty files of the
> same name.
>
> I did a chkdsk (DOS 5) and found many damaged hard drive sectors.  I ran
> fixdisk and reinstalled the missing programs, and things are running
> again.
>
> Is this a sign that the hard drive is on its last legs?
>
> One other strange thing:  though the autoexec.bat file seemed undamaged,
> when I typed AUTOEXEC at the c: prompt the computer came back with "no
> such file".  Even though it clearly showed up on a DIR, and all the
> commands in the autoexec.bat listed out when I ran the LIST utility.
>
> I deleted the autoexec.bat directory, retyped it all, and it then worked.
>  Bizarre?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan Hughes, Champaign IL
>
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