loge.hixie.ch

Hixie's Natural Log

2002-08-14 00:09 UTC Mysterious feature

Dell suggested I reinstall Windows. That didn't work (when it had formatted 77% of the disk, clunk clunk stonk followed by a crash). After that, the hard disk was not found. So the Dell technician got me to run the following assembler (which, I believe, is intended to wipe the hard disk's partition table):

mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,80
int 13
int 20

Magically, this fixed the problem. The disk formatted fine and didn't make clunking sounds.

I would love to know who at Dell decided to add a "tighten the screw holding the hard disk's reading head together" interrupt to their BIOS.

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