Hi,
New here! I hope one of you fine folks can help!
I've got an old PC that caught a virus a couple of years ago and pretty much died. The virus was a BIOS one although at the time I thought I had a hard drive fault.
Anyway, long story short, I ended up buying a new machine.
On and off, I've returned to the old machine to try and resurrect it.
There's no virus anymore (I somewhat embarrassingly identified it as Chernobyl) - I've flushed the BIOS and zero-filled the hard drive at least a couple of times each.
However, each time I try and install an OS, the machine freezes or bombs out. I've tried XP, RedHat 9 and Ubuntu. The first two seem to bomb out at the point of actually writing files to the hard drive with an "unknown error". The latter gets 79% through the install and freezes when trying to "configure Linux i386". I can, however, happily boot and run Ubuntu from the live CD (NB this is a way to try Ubuntu out without installing anything - it all runs in memory). I've tried the manufacturer's recovery CD but it fails due to the loss of the BIOS tattooing and they don't support recovery from viruses in any way.
I'd really like to get this machine running again, not least 'cos I think it's a waste to have a reasonably spec'd machine go to the tip. I also have plans to extend the use of our home network (audio streaming, etc) and it'd be nice to have the machine as a file server.
It's an Evesham Axis 1.7GHz Athlon with 512 MB DDR RAM. I've tried three different HDDs, a ten-year-old 2GB thing, the 40GB Fujitsu that the PC came with (which, as above, has been blasted with a low level formatter) and a brand new 120GB one. The motherboard is an Asus A7A266.
I wonder if the BIOS settings are wrong, but don't really know enough about them to know where to look and what to look for. Not sure what else it could be.
Any advice gratefully received. It'll probably be tomorrow night before I can try anything out!
Thanks,
J.
New here! I hope one of you fine folks can help!
I've got an old PC that caught a virus a couple of years ago and pretty much died. The virus was a BIOS one although at the time I thought I had a hard drive fault.
Anyway, long story short, I ended up buying a new machine.
On and off, I've returned to the old machine to try and resurrect it.
There's no virus anymore (I somewhat embarrassingly identified it as Chernobyl) - I've flushed the BIOS and zero-filled the hard drive at least a couple of times each.
However, each time I try and install an OS, the machine freezes or bombs out. I've tried XP, RedHat 9 and Ubuntu. The first two seem to bomb out at the point of actually writing files to the hard drive with an "unknown error". The latter gets 79% through the install and freezes when trying to "configure Linux i386". I can, however, happily boot and run Ubuntu from the live CD (NB this is a way to try Ubuntu out without installing anything - it all runs in memory). I've tried the manufacturer's recovery CD but it fails due to the loss of the BIOS tattooing and they don't support recovery from viruses in any way.
I'd really like to get this machine running again, not least 'cos I think it's a waste to have a reasonably spec'd machine go to the tip. I also have plans to extend the use of our home network (audio streaming, etc) and it'd be nice to have the machine as a file server.
It's an Evesham Axis 1.7GHz Athlon with 512 MB DDR RAM. I've tried three different HDDs, a ten-year-old 2GB thing, the 40GB Fujitsu that the PC came with (which, as above, has been blasted with a low level formatter) and a brand new 120GB one. The motherboard is an Asus A7A266.
I wonder if the BIOS settings are wrong, but don't really know enough about them to know where to look and what to look for. Not sure what else it could be.
Any advice gratefully received. It'll probably be tomorrow night before I can try anything out!
Thanks,
J.
No offence meant, but I'm still unsure whether my probs are BIOS related or not so don't know exactly where I should be looking on the Asus site.
