[Joe Forster/STA]

Hi guys, just a recent story for you...

Last Friday an old schoolmate of mine gave me a phone call, saying his PC stopped booting, saying there was no OS installed. He has Windows 98 as well as Windows XP, with quite a lot of applications installed, but the most important part was the music and samples for his own pop band and some other bands he lends a helping hand to. (Yeah, yeah, as usual, no backups at all!)

The problem turned out to be in the boot area and the beginning of FAT1 on the first, FAT32-formatted partition. Many sectors were simply overwritten by some system-related data (chunks from extended CMOS, registry or Windows system memory?). With careful inspection and manual/semi-automatic repair, everything came back, none of the partitions reported any file system problems in Checkdisk/Scandisk afterwards. (Ridiculously enough, the software that repaired the overwritten areas properly was fsck.vfat from my old Red Hat Linux installation!)

In the meantime, my friend told me that the moment when the PC stopped booting was when he installed GT Legends, a Starforce-protected game, and allowed it to reboot the PC. Guess what, now he wants to get rid of the game completely and never try to install a Starforce-protected game on his PC again!