I maintain a half dozen PC workstations at my school for video editing, most
of which I've built. I was off on a field trip Friday and I turned on all
the machines and left things ready for the sub. During video class, some
kids started fooling around and did something to one of the computers,
perhaps in the bios or in Windows (XP) or even physically, because when I
returned at the end of the day the computer was frozen on the desktop screen
but with no taskbar, mouse cursor or any other icon showing.
No key strokes or mouse movements made any difference, so I did a reboot and
then the computer advised me to run a checkdisk before coming up all the way
to Windows, which I did but that process froze at about 20% completion of
step 2.
I tried turning it off then back on and then the computer couldn't find the
primary drive and hung during the bootup process. I went into the bios to
check around and eventually got it to recognize the primary drive so I saved
the changes and it continued to load. It again advised to run checkdisk and
this time it proceeded through the process. It reported literally dozens of
files that had a problem and had been repaired during check disk. Once up
into Windows, everything looked normal again and I was able to start and use
Photoshop and MS Word, but when I tried to start Premiere Pro the computer
turned rebooted and then couldn't find either the master or slave drives on
the primary controller.
I spent over an hour trying to stabilize, it but it either won't recognize
the primary master, and sometimes the primary slave too, or if I'm
successful at that, it tried to load Windows and kept hanging at the Win XP
logo.
I've tried everything I know in the bios (loading bios defaults, manually
selecting the drives) but nothing seems to stick. I tried last known good
configuration also with no luck. I'm stumped.
This could have been done by operational or physical carelessness or done
with malicious intent, I don't know. The sub said that the kids were fooling
around and the room is small, so it could be physical damage, or they could
have gone into the bios or into Windows explorer or even the registry and
made some changes.
No one would admit to anything (but that's another story).
Can anyone please advise me on what might be going on, and what I might try
next?
I can reformat everything and reload if it comes to that, but if it is
damage to the bios or the mobo or the drives then it won't help.
Thanks a lot for any advice on this problem.

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