Re: hangnail

[jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

L Anderson wrote:

> >Regardless, I'll make a Major effort to help you get to the
> >Colonel of your problem and give you my 2 cents worth on GENERAL
> >FAILURE.
>
> Having said that, if I were you, I would first suspect a disk drive (or
> possibly the disk controller) before either of the printers. Especially
> since I infer from what you wrote, the problem happens with either
> printer. I'd recommend you backup your stuff then run scandisk to clean
> up any lost or cross-linked clusters. You could also run a surface
> analysis if your version of scandisk supports that or you have other
> utilities (Norton) that do. I would also check for virii.
> Michaelangelo comes to mind as a virus that would disable floppy drives
> and result in the system saluting General Failure.

This sounds very plausible to me. I have seen messages like this -- mostly long
ago, I think -- in regard to hardware failures of one stripe or another. And I
too have heard of virus examples along these lines. If not those, I'd next
suspect W95 . . . but then that's probably a case of the usual suspects. One
thing though: DOS runs at a much more fundamental level, and is nowhere near as
flakey. If you boot real DOS (say, from a diskette, if it's not an option on
your hard drive anymore), these symptoms still happen, and *if* there is no virus
at work, it pretty much has to be a hardware problem.

Jordan