This question may never produce a definitive answer, but let?s go for it.
This morning, I went to replace a CD-ROM drive in a users PC. This process went without a hitch. Afterward, I rebooted and was showing the user that that everything worked. Ithen noticed that the user had only 64M RAM. I then shut down the PC, installed an additional 64M RAM. Upon rebooting, the BIOS counted up all 128M of RAM without any errors, but the PC failed to start. I ran (the non-destructive) WD Diags and determined the HD was fine. I then went to run the WinNT setup CD to attempt to repair the files, assuming they were somehow corrupt. The WinNT setup utility ran for a bit then informed me that there was no operating system to repair. The util told me something akin to the drive appears to be a new unformatted drive, do I want to ? I then installed the drive into another PC as the slave drive, ran Disk Manager only to find the entire drive was unallocated.
Besides ESD, (which I don?t believe to be an issue here) what could have, would have caused the entire drive to be wiped clean just by installing additional RAM?
