On Monday, August 03, 1998 7:52 PM Dan Hughes 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 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?

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?

Dan Hughes, Champaign IL

Hi Dan,
The drive is probably a Seagate ST-351 IDE, it was a popular choice in Zenith
PC's. Do not low-level format a 40 meg IDE drive.  If you have an MFM drive like
a Seagate 251 they can be low level formatted using the BIOS routine if such a
routine is present.  If the drive is shot, and the Zenith has a BIOS that supports
user-configurable drives, any IDE controller / IDE drive up to 500 meg will work, if
you upgrade to DOS 6.22.  You can also stick with DOS 5 if you find a disk that
is close in size but not smaller than a BIOS disk selection, since most IDE drives
will translate the cylinders heads tracks numbers to suit, as long as the BIOS
numbers don't work out to a size that is bigger than the physical size of the disk.
For example, a drive supporting universal translate mode and is physically 105 meg
in size will work well with any disk entry in the BIOS that is approximately 100 meg.
The closer you get to 105 the more formatted space you get, but if you go over 105
the drive will not work.  You would have to have a compelling reason to
upgrade a 286, however, rather than replacing it.  Locally, completely configured
used 486's with 300 to 500 meg hard disks and SVGA monitors are selling
for $160.00.  Some of them look very clean, too.

While your problem may indicate impending failure, it is just as likely
caused by bugs.  Those old computers and software were fragile.  I remember
reformatting trashed hard disks and having them run fine for years, without
ever finding a satisfying answer to how the disk got trashed.
The plink error is a linker error, similar to a dll error in windows.  Developers used
to use a linker (MS called theirs link.exe, others were plink and blink)
as the final step in creating a software program.  It usually
means a software program can't find a component, which makes sense if files
are missing.

I don't think any of this is too weird.  Cleaning up the hard disk and re-installing
everything could get you a couple more years of usage.
Tom Turak