I really hope that someone can help me with this. I have a P233 with American Megatrends AMI bios.This computer was working perfectly but has been sitting without drives in it for a couple of months. I just returned from a Ham Fest yesterday with a box of 35 hard drives which I bought for 5.00 The drives range in size from 1 to 15 GBTS. My intention was to try these drives in a known working computer without a hard drive to see if any of them would come up. What I planned on doing was to go into bios before post and try to auto detect the drive.Then I was going to format that good drive and add it to another working computer which I'm presently using. Then I planned to copy my pertinent files from the existing C drive to the new D drive. I reasoned that even if the unknown drive had a virus, it could only affect the RAM in which case a power cycle on/off would clear that and so installing it into a stripped down box could not harm the computer in any way. I've tested drives like this before without any problem it seems. Afterward formatting would take care of any virus.
Well apparently I was wrong. Things didn't work out the way I had hoped. The first drive I selected came right up without my first going into bios and auto detecting it. How it did that without my first auto detecting it made no sense to me. I would have expected to se some message along with some beeps telling me that the configuration was wrong and directing me into bios to correct it. Initially during this boot up the screen had some logo talking about a server of some kind and then I saw something about Linux. Then there was miles it seemed of code displayed on the screen one line after another. It looked like a program was unpacking or something but I'm not sure. Finally the computer just hung. I turned it off and then on again. I managed to access the bios screen and auto detected the drive. I also changed the date and updated the configuration to show just a master and one 3.5 floppy. Everything seemed as it should be. I then exited bios saving the configuration however it never completed post. I then tried a power cycle again and this time the bios screen came up with gibberish super imposed on it. After this and repeated tries I was not able to get into bios again. My son suggested a possible "bios virus". I had no idea that such a thing was possible. Isn't bios ROM? That being the case how can something "write" to it? I pulled the battery overnight and this morning re installed it. Everything is pulled except the RAM and the video board. I then tried it again. The first time it let me into bios. I noted that the date as well as the configuration was wrong so I assumed I dumped everything that was not burned into the chip. I did the re configuration, saved and exited but now its not letting me back into bios again. And it's not completing post either. It's really frustrating and discouraging to realize that I have now apparently damaged a previously good machine by performing a seemingly innocent act. Does anyone have any ideas what happened and if there might be a way to correct it? Any help would be most sincerely appreciated. Lenny