Here's one....

[DHatAVI]

A friend was cleaning some old files from his hard drive a couple nights ago, when his computer suddenly flashed a blue screen and then rebooted.
He didn’t notice if there was an error message, but he said there was no time to read it if there was. Anyway, when the computer rebooted, it displayed the “Replace with system disk, hit any key” message, but there was no disk in the floppy drive.
I went over and looked at it for him and here is what I found.
The HD was still recognized by BIOS, and could be accessed when the computer was boot from a floppy, so I replaced the ‘SYS’ files on the HD, and was able to boot to a command prompt, or the boot menu. If I tried starting Windows or Safe mode from the boot menu, the computer would boot back to a
command prompt. If I went to the Windows dir. and type “win”, I would get a ‘missing HIMEM.SYS’ message. I checked the dir., and it was still listed, but I replaced it anyway, and still got the same message.
To make and allready too long story shorter, here’s what finally fixed it.
I renamed ‘HIMEM.SYS’ to .OLD and recopied it
to the HD, then I copied ‘MSDOS.SYS’ from the
windows dir. to the root dir., and windows was up and running. But, the story isn’t over yet, he has a cable online service that he uses, and AOL for his daughter (because of the parental controls), well, the AOL dir. was completely gone, only the desk-
top icon remained. Has anyone heard of a trojan that may be going around that would do this, or is it possible that someone had accessed the computer thru the cable service and wreaked this havok? Scandisk reported no errors when run in the thorough mode.
The computer is a Gateway PII-233 w/ win95.

David

[This message has been edited by DHatAVI (edited 11-24-1999).]

[Eli]

Try running scandisk (if you already haven't). My P75 had similar problems when it's hard drive started to die. It wound up with around 80 bad clusters (growing each day)...

[Underclocked]

Sounds as if you are fully capable of fixing his system. I would suggest you tell him not to be "cleaning out old files" again. [img]/forum/biggrin.gif[/img]

[hallam2003]

who agrees? a blue screen that has a error message usually means some kind of memory resedent error....i had an error message and a reboot right after but all i had to do was run scandisk(like ussual) and all was good... you tend to get the "blue screen" errors alot for some reason...well let me take that back some do some don't i haven't a clue how to fix the thing i just had to add my .02


hallam