ok this is how it goes: a few days ago i had an electric power crash.the thing is the power came immediately on and when so the comp rebooted then suddenly it stopped.after a few unsuccesfull tries to turn it back on it worked but now when it loaded windows98 it would go only to a message like this: windows protection error: error reading drive c abort/ignore/retry/fail.after i used abort it suggested that i should go to command prompt and type registry/fix (i must specify that at the time of the power off i was running Norton Windoctor which was just looking at registries). anyway i took the hdd to service and they told me it had bad sectors (lots) and then they changed it. now i had a new hdd with win98 installed. after installing some games and codecs and stuff it started crashing and freezing while playing. after a few reboots when after loading windows it gave me blue screens (it just loaded and after some moments of waiting in desktop it appeared the blue screen). i decided then to format the drive and reinstall everything. but at fdisk it freezed. then i rebooted and then first the monitor went black (the led was orange). after this at the hdd and cdrom and 'press del to enter setup' screen it only showed : award, some numbers at the top only and the rest nothing. now i'm afraid to do anything so i don't damage it furthermore. if anyone can understand what i meant and can help me please do. thank you.
Well, it sounds like that surge must have hit your motherboard, and has basically screwed it up. I'd take a peek inside the system and see if there are any scorch marks on components, especially the motherboard. If those look okay, it might be that the power supply got creamed, and in that case, it means you'll want to get a new one. 2nd: It also sounds like you don't have a surge protector---which can help prevent stuff like this from happening. APC makes some nice ones that run about $30 and offer up to $10,000 equipment coverage.
