help, bad bios or motherboard, y2k???

[frazzled]

My friend has a pentium2 233mhz computer and shortly after the new year 1 wk to be exact he crashed his computer, well i had to reformat and started with a totaly clean hard drive. loaded win98 and have had to reformat twice since then and his comp is not recognizing several things such as soundblaster one time and then dvd won't work and then the thing wouldn't start recognizing the modem and on and on. now recently (last couple of days ) it has started saying that it is not finding certain files during the start up or when windows gets to the desktop screen...so the question is ...is it bad BIOS or a virus or what ..it is driving me nuts...

thanks in advance...

[ktwebb]

Had you or anybody else changed anything inside the machine prior to this starting? Sounds like it might be ESD. (electrostatic discharge) ESD starts in one area usually, and then spreads to other parts of the machine. Kinda like cancer, though generally when esd hits something it loses functionality alltogether, so this might not be the case her. Doesnt really sound like a virus to me, but I could be wrong there. Could also be the board going, ESD or not.

[lightbringer]

try unplugging the system totally from the wall and unplug anything else attached to it for a ong period of time.. thsi will disappate any charge probably... then I recommend you run a diangostic program if a manufaturer made your pc check their website and get there latest diagnostics and see what you find. By the way you should delete the boot records as wel and re fdisk when you wipe drive clean. I always do an fidsk /mbr debug(deltets al paritions), fdisk, foramt , then fdisk .mbr, then reset your cmos data to original settings (default settings). YOu can get a good debug program from you computer manufacturer or someone who knows what they are doing. I have oen buts it is realy strong so it may not be the best for you. But if you really need it I will give it to you. Also, make sure you start-up disk is clean you will need a win 98 start-up floppy by the way to do this.

[This message has been edited by lightbringer (edited 01-27-2000).]