Ran DBAN -- computer crashed

[juris]

I have an older Sony Vaio (466) with a 10 GB hard drive that I am giving to a neighbor and I am trying to wipe the drive. It had been updated to WinXP Pro.

I followed the instructions and put the floppy in, booted, hit Enter...it showed "loading Kernel..." and adding a couple dots every few seconds for a minute or 2.

After about 2 minutes, the system simply shutoff completely. It will not power back on at all. No amount of fiddling with cables, etc will get the thing to even light up the power on button.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[dajhorn]

Remove both the main battery and the cmos battery (that looks like a large round watch battery) and run the wipe from outlet power.

If this works, then replace the cmos battery.

 

[juris]

Thanks...I tried that, but it still didn't turn on, so I wasn't able to run the wipe yet. Is there a simple test for the power supply, so I can rule that out?

 

[juris]

Update

Ok...I've done some troubleshooting here. The hardware is fine. I have another identical computer and I swapped each piece out seperately - even the power supply.

I am perplexed now. Logically, it doesn't make sense to me. I simply started to run the DBAN floppy and it was halfway through the startup when the computer simply shut off. It will not turn on at all now as a complete system. If everything works when connected to another system, why should it matter when connected as the original system.

Is it possible that the DBAN download had a virus? Is it even possible for a piece of code to even harm physical devices?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[dajhorn]

If everything works when connected to another system, why should it matter when connected as the original system.

Perhaps the hardware just coincidentally failed.

Is it possible that the DBAN download had a virus?

Did you download DBAN from http://dban.sourceforge.net/ ? This is the only place to get the official release.

There are several modified releases of DBAN being distributed, which are unsupported.