A friend, (25 miles from here, who has his own
"computer guy"), gave me a P-233mmx with
what I think would be about 98% of the contents
of his hard drive "missing".

He thought the Hard Drive crashed  --  wanted a
faster machine -- so replaced the entire thing...

He had never asked about it, and I only saw it after I
picked it up at a Holiday party.
He had just signed up for a Cable modem about a month
before having "any" problems and may not know anything
about security.

EVERYTHING Microsoft was missing, (it had Win98),
and there were very few programs or directories
on the hard drive. I had to boot with a FAT32 boot disk
to see them  -- Dir C:\  /p /w got me ONLY one page
which included only about 4 directories. The directories
were nothing special (or anything I have). I used (MS) Edit,
and looked at what I could and what was there "seemed fine".

Thinking this was odd, I ran Norton Disk Editor (DOS)
from SystemsWorks2001PRO on the drive and the
first 400 or so sectors were filled with nothing but the
alphabet. (I jambed "the down arrow key" to make it
scroll automatically.)

Does this sound like a virus, and if so, any clues as
to which one(s)?

Thanks.  I would like to re-build the system as a spare,
but after such a catastrophic failure, I have everything
that I touched it with quarantined.
I was very worried about my own systems and did an
IBM WIPE and then an IBM ZAP, so asking is like
closing the barn door after the horses are gone.
I stripped it down to basic hardware, stuck Win95B and
an old NortonSystemWorks2000 on it and scanned the
HD for hours with perfect results as a test.

Opinions? (Off-list "OK")     Rick Glazier

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