I told my
BIOS to
auto-detect my
secondary slave IDE hard disk, because I frequently swap it in and out when I want to copy something. So, every time I boot, my BIOS goes through the normal
POST deal, beeps, tests
RAM, and says something along the lines of:
Auto-detecting secondary slave... found
Maxtor 2.0Gb (long serial number)
Of course, I don't usually bother to read this. But one morning, while I was turning on the computer, I looked at the monitor and noticed it said:
Auto-detecting secondary slave... found
Martor 2.0Gb (long serial number)
I blinked. It didn't really sink in at first. It was a few moments before the panic hit and I frantically pulled the plug.
I wasn't too sure what you're supposed to do when your BIOS makes a typo. I opened the case, carefully dusted off and tightened the IDE connectors, and it never happened again. I've never had any corruption on my hard drives, either. This seriously freaked me out. I felt like I had just seen a ghost. If one of my computer-illiterate friends had told me this happened to them, I would've chalked it up to a misreading on their part without a moment's hesitation.
This is what I get from buying cheap parts from a disreputable shop, I suppose. Some RAM I bought from them had bad parity, too. And every so often, the POST stops at a "hard disk failure"; I suppose this has something to do with the typo. I guess the moral of all this is, my computer sucks.