I setup a 233 mhz computer for someone and put windows ME on it.  They gave
it back to me saying it had a cluster error and that scandisk would freeze
up after a certain percentage.  I ran a western digital diagnostic on it and
it said error 0208, smart status failed after media scan... replace drive.

I put another western digital hard drive in it.  I believe it made a pop
sound when it started up, I'm not sure.  I tried to run a format from a
windows startup floppy to erase the hard drive.  After the format it was
saying trying to recover allocation units with like 3 numbers separated by
comments, changing like heads and sectors....

It did this for a while and then stopped and said format failed.

So I guess the computer is ruining the hard drives.  I don't know if a Virus
will do this, it'd have to be in the circuit boards, memory, bios or
something cause I completely removed the old hard drive before I put the
other one in.  The only other thing I can think of is that something
electrical in it is ruining the hard drives but I don't know why or how.  If
there is a virus somewhere in the computer is there a diagnostic that can
find it, are there only some places it could be?  If it's a virus or if it's
hardware, can the problem be isolated and fixed?  If I did take it to
someone could they fix it without basically replacing the motherboard or
something?  I'm not sure what's going on with it.

thank you for any help
Robert Kupferer

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