Now this happened when I installed my 2nd 160g WD hd a few weeks back and I thought my ps was going bad so I went out and bought a new Antec variable 400 ps and the shut down problem went away...untill yesterday (fri. the 13th). I wait to let the shutdown circuit time to recylce and then hit the start button and the black fong fires right up. Uh oh! Boot up screen shows no hard drives! So I poke around in bios, when I happened to remember some fine fellow here in the tech forum say something about ribbon connectors. I go to the spare parts drawer (you know...the one where you toss all those leftover comp. parts that may someday come in handy) and get a unused new ribbon and hook it up, reboot and the two hd's are there! Problem now is once I get past the primary boot I get a "Can't find NTLDR, ctrl/alt/del to restart comp.
Now here's where a cold draft blows thru my room, lights flicker and things go bump in the dark. I have the side panel leaning against the case and pull it away when the comp. dies again. This happened a few times before but I thought it was something with the old ps. I turn the comp. on, go back to the same reboot message and this time I just touch the side panel to the case and off goes the comp. So now I'm thinking there's a short somewhere. So I dis-connect everything, right down to taking out the mb. Can't see anything obvious so I brush all the dust off everything and put it back togeather. So far no shut downs due to shorts.
I now disconnect the winxp drive and see if I can boot into the win98 hd. No go. Nothing wants to work so I finally decide to format it. Useing a boot up disk I go to format the C partition. I get a "invalid media type" message. Hmmm? so I try to format the D partition. Same message. Now I go to the 3rd and last partition but I first do a dir/ command (I did the same the C & D but got the abort/retry message)and here's where the possible virii is indicated. In the first line of code was a valantines heart symbol next to the word "YA" as thought to say "Love Ya". In the next line was a little rectangular box with what appeared to be "eyes" in it and coming out the side of it was what looked like a upraised arm. Maybe you coders know what these symbols mean.
So I "format E:" and the process begins. What happens though isafter about a 6% completion it goes into "Attempting to repair cluster 75,000". Long and short I let it run all night and finally kill it when it reaches cluster 165,000. So I dunno, can a malicious proggy/virus kill a HD?
So here I am today running just on the new HD and have yet to see how my games will play now that I replaced the ribbon connect and cleaned out the cobwebs inside. Wish me luck and mail me a rabbits foot.
