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of cases, directories had somehow been replaced by empty files of the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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