HDD Error

I'm trying to help a friend to do routine maintenance on their computer which I suspect is loaded with viruses since they've never ever had an anti-virus program installed. They couldn't scan cause too many programs running in background, and when they did Ctl-Alt-Del to end the programs, no program box would come up. Took CPU home and hooked up my monitor, mouse & keyboard. When hooking up the keyboard, it only lights up for a couple of seconds, then lights go out. It doesn't boot to Windows; goes to the BIOS and says the USB mouse and 1966608KB are okay. But says "Sec Master HDD Error ". Press F1 to resume. Does anyone know what this means? And when I press F1, nothing happens since the keyboard doesn't appear to be working.

Celeron 466 MHz

 

Try using a PS2 keybd & a PS2 mouse - even if enabled in BIOS, you won't get any USB functions if drivers aren't loading and it sounds like you have to nurse that puppy back to health. Good Luck.

 

I would really like to try your suggestion, but the reason I used the USB port for the mouse is because I can't seem to get a PS2 mouse to fit in the mouse port. The mouse port appears to have holes for 8 pins & my mouse only has 6 pins. The keyboard port to the left is okay with 6 pins, but to the right, the port looks like 8 pins and the mouse won't fit in.

 

If you are getting a hard disk failure message, you haven't gotten to the place where a mouse is needed. Until you fix the hard disk problem, the OS is not a factor either.

Move the hard disk to another machine and use a Windows 9x or ME boot disk. Type FDisk and press enter. See if FDisk recognizes the disk. If it doesn't, the hard disk may be dead.

Tell us your result.

 

There r also several programs u can use to recover the data from the HD. some of them r

PC INSPECTOR FILE RECOVERY
BADCOPY

i dont remember their sites, but if u do a search in google for example u should find them easily.

 

I did finally get the computer to boot to Windows once I got the keyboard working. My problem was that I had the mouse plugged into a USB port and the keyboard plugged into the PS/2 mouse port & that's why the keyboard would only light up for a few seconds. So I plugged the mouse into the PS/2 mouse port, and I bought a PS/2 to AT Adapter (6 Pin MiniDin Female to 5 Pin Din Male) to plug in the keyboard to a large round 5 Pin socket recessed deep into the case. I had initially asked my friend how many pins he had on the end of his keyboard connector and he told me 6 but he neglected to tell me that the keyboard was also connected to a 5 pin AT adapter. I figured it out by chance when I was browsing through a computer store & saw this 5 Pin AT adapter. So when I got to the message "Press F1 to Resume ", the keyboard finally worked & then booted on through to Windows. I know this doesn't resolve the HDD error, but at least I could work on it. There were at least 4 viruses loading in the Start-up programs and tons of spyware so advised my friend to get professional to check it out & remove viruses since install of Norton crashed and unable to go online to download a free anti-virus scanner. I could have tried working on it myself but it looked too sick and I didn't want my friend to think it was me that ******* it up. I'll install Norton & Spybot later for him. Thanks for all your help.