yep absolutly correct and the bad battery will cause the bios to lose it's
settings as to what and where the hard drive is
On Monday 23 July 2001 17:15, Jose M. Sanchez wrote:
> This message is -NOT- caused by a virus!
>
> It is caused by the drive's own seek mechanism being unable to
> recalibrate and locate the first track and sector at a "low" level.
>
> This is not the same as corrupted a boot sector which a virus can cause.
> You can have a corrupt boot sector & track yet the drive will not issue
> the hard disk fail error message. Rather the system will hang or fail to
> boot.
>
> Low level formatting (which it is NOT!) merely re-initializes the data
> in the sectors on an ide drive while checking for bad spots. Unlike
> older MFM drives, this is performed at a much higher level than IDE. For
> the most part, unless you have a special hardware device which can lay
> down the timing marks, you cannot really "low level format" an IDE
> drive, even via the bios.
>
> One thing though. If something screwed up the settings on your BIOS, you
> may get this error, even though the drive is fine. This is because the
> BIOS is being told to look for the first track somewhere it's not. Check
> that the settings are set to how they used to be, or for AUTO detection
> of the drive and AUTO for block mode.
>
> -JMS
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Marcia L Waller
> Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 3:31 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [newbie] Primary master hard disk fail
>
>
> Dear ALL,
> Thank you for the advice. I wonder about the possibility of correcting
> this hard drive problem. Oddly I can get my Northon Utilities 5.00 CD up
> and I am viewing things but I do not how to use Disk Editor. I am
> browsing with it but there do not seem to be extensive directions on how
> to use it. Is there anyway that I can reformat my disk either with
> Norton or using the HDD low level format in the BIOS? I have a feeling
> this hard drive is not dead but could have been hit with a virus?
> Strange characters show up with the boot up messages for hdb drive. I do
> not care about saving files at this point. I just want to be able to use
> my computer again and do a fresh install of LM8 again. Any advice will
> be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Sincerely, Marcia
