Off topic, but a decent question...

From: Daniel A. Seagraves <DSEAGRAV_at_toad.xkl.com>
Date: Wed Feb 11 08:04:37 1998

We just gave a teacher a Magnavox Headstart 486SX PC. It has a large
yellow sticker on the back that reads "DO NOT FORMAT THE HARDDISK". So
what do you think he did? :-) Tried upgrading DOS. (5.0 > 6.2)
Dos says, "Wanna format the harddisk?" User says "OK, Whatever..."
Now we have a dead PC. It will boot off the floppy, it will do dir C:, but
it refuses to boot from the harddisk. I'm thinking they hid something
proprietary in the bootsector. Anyone else know anything? We have no docs
for it, but there's another PC like it in the building somewhere, I have to
go find it... Would it fix my problem if I were to get the partition
table off the other (good) machine and write it to this one, would that fix it?
We already laplinked it to another Magnavox Headstart and tried transferring
everything back, that finished OK but still won't boot. I'm getting ready to
hand the guy a bootdisk and say "Here, you have to boot from that..."
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Received on Wed Feb 11 1998 - 08:04:37 GMT