On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:45:13 -0700 (PDT), klem kedidelhopper
wrote:

On Oct 16, 8:22*pm, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
I was going to keep my nose out of this, but I'm so thoroughly confused that
I have to butt in.
What are you trying to do? Test the drives? If so, this seems about the
worst possible way. It would make more sense to set these drives as slaves
and boot them on a known-good computer (as someone else suggested). Even
better, if they're IDE-ATA drives, you can mount them in a box with a USB
interface, and simply attach them to a running machine.

What is the question you're asking? I suspect it's the wrong one.

I am Not William, but item by item:
William
Thank you for "butting in". I appreciate everyone's input, yours
included. I thought that I was being very concise. However I have to
ask seriously did you read the OP?

I have. You were fairly clear. I think your BIOS got whacked.

And if I did follow what you just
suggested how would that have prevented a CMOS virus, if that's what
this problem is?

Definitely. If you never execute code from the used drive it cannot
transmit a virus to your "clean-up" machine. Big difference in not trying
to boot from it.

But to address another question I have why would
these engineers in their infinite wisdom write a bios to anything
other than a non writable eprom.

Cost. Cost. Cost. Availability. Mask ROM is prohibitively expensive
in the storage sizes used for BIOS these days, flash is much cheaper and
has the feature of being updatable. The updatability feature has fixed
problems on two mainboards i have had.

It would seem like some things should
be sacred. Lenny

?-)

--
JosephKK