[Malvern] Hard drive woes

[Andy Morris]

Help!  I have two problems:

(1) A colleague who has three W98 machines on a home network, had to rebuild
the installation on the unit with dial-up access recently, after a virus got
in.  Now, a month later, after extensive work, his HD suddenly went
read-only - well for W98 it did; Knoppix has no such difficulties.  We
thought that there was something in the MBR that meant that windoze (in
various forms) regarded the unit as write-protected, even for 'fdisk /mbr',
but which Linux ignored. Phil supplied me with instructions that allowed us
to clear the MBR, except for the partition table, but to no avail.

Has anyone got any experience with hard drives that can be set
write-protected for Windows only, but not Linux?  Can they be set back?  As
yet we have not tried a complete format (it's got 4 separate partitions),
but in any case, if 'fdisk' won't write to it, it's unlikely that windows
'format' will, and formatting a DOS partition with a Linux command may not
get rid of the problem.

The alternative is to get him to move to Linux, which I have been trying for
some time - he's getting very familiar with my Knoppix 3.3 disk, almost a
self-learning curve -  but as a serious gamer of many years he wants
something that can run his (large) collection of DOS and windows games -
WINE is not yet there (we've tried) - is there anything else that can
emulate reliably for some of the older games programs - and this includes
networked games?

(2) The same colleague is looking to translate a MIDI file into the WAV
equivalent.  There is stuff on the net to this, but mostly shareware with a
(short) time limit.  Is there anything available in Linux that we can be
pointed to?  Debian based preferably, because that's the underscore for
Knoppix.

Any help or pointers would be gratefully appreciated.


Cheers,

Andy M.