--- In [email protected], "Donald Drouin" <donald_drouin@...> wrote: >
> IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO ALL
> =======================
>
> Yesterday my computer crashed, and I have losted everything.
> I think I got a virus.
I'm sorry to hear that, Donald - that is bad news. No update for a month is tolerable, as is the possibility that everybody's recently submitted LPBs and levels are unrecoverable (they can be resent). However, the ongoing viability of LT updates needs to be addressed.
Some salient points:
1. You may not have a virus. Your computer is around 7 or 8 years old and it is possible that either the mainboard or hard disk has failed. If the mainboard (or CPU) has failed, the hard disk can be installed in another PC to access the data on it. If the hard disk has failed, all may still not be lost.
2. Irrespective of the cause, the data on the hard disk is not necessarily unrecoverable (or even damaged). It is unlikely that either simple component failure or virus infection has wiped/corrupted the entire hard disk contents. If you get an error regarding the hard drive not initialising then any data may not be accessible. However, if the error is a read error, the data can probably be recovered. This leads to the next point.
3. Have you tried booting your computer up with a system disk (usually a floppy disk but could be a CD if your computer's BIOS supports the CD/DVD drive as a boot device)? The first diskette of the Windows 98 installation set is a system disk. You may find that the system will start and you are then able to navigate to the C:\ drive and perform a DIR.
If that seems to work, it may simply be that the Master Boot Record sector has become corrupted. This can usually be restored if you have a copy of the program FDISK (found on Windows 98 installation disk). At the DOS Prompt type FDISK /MBR .
If your hard drive boots up but Windows doesn't you may just need to reinstall Windows. Obviously you should NOT format the hard disk, otherwise you will wipe it's contents. Reinstalling Windows should not affect any data already on the hard drive. However, programs that use Windows will probably need to be reinstalled to update the newly created registry.
I could be more specific if I had more information on the error.
Hope you get it sorted out.
Mark