Is it toast?  Well, not necessarily.  It could be that the virus - or 
whatever - has trashed your hard drive, but an FDISK, reformat, and fresh 
o.s. installation will bring the computer back to life.  It all depends on 
what the real problem is.

Joyce, I don't know what operating system you have, nor do I know what you 
have available as system disks for this computer.  Therefore, as a start, I 
will be brief.  I would make a boot disk on a cd or floppy - whatever you 
can do and whatever will work with your computer.  Make sure FDISK is on the 
boot disk.  Then boot the computer from the boot disk (you will have to 
change the cmos (bios) settings to boot from the boot disk) and FDISK the 
drive on the 5000.  This will completely erase the hard drive and you can do 
a reformat of the drive and a fresh reinstall of the operating system 
(assuming that you have the disks to do that; they should have come with the 
5000).   Now, the computer will be as good as new and you can use it to do 
what you want.  (Once the new o.s. is installed, change the boot disk back 
to the hard drive.)

If this is not clear, let us know what operating system was running on the 
5000, whether or not you have a disk for reinstalling that operating system, 
and where we lost you.  (We can give more detailed instructions.)

Dean Kukral

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joyce E" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2006 8:09 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Is it toast?


My older computer (not the one I'm using now) is a Compaq Presario 5000 with
two CD drives.  It fell victim to adware/spyware in September of last year.
Now I need to use it, to copy some personal stuff from one CD to another,
but when I boot it up all I get is a lot of chatter on the monitor that
looks like a bazillion old-time memory chips, row on row and flashing on and
off.  I tried the Norton website but I can't even get into DOS, much less
Windows.  And I've tried my old "Norton rescue" disks to no avail.  So how
can I rescue my poor ol' Compaq?  Is there something I can download onto a
CD on this computer to transfer to the Compaq?    Or is the Compaq just so
much unusable hardware?  (Happily, I made regular backups so I didn't lose
much if any data.)  TIA for any help!  Please?

Joyce E.
southeast Ohio

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