Prehistoric Asus L2000E notebook with IDE HDD not recognized and other mind blowing questions

Hi all,

I recently trying to revive an Asus L2000E notebook for my lady - more out of a tinkering interest and how much she literally lights up looking at this brick of technology.

I had ordered a replacement charger, and it arrived a few days ago. Booted it up, and it booted up XP no problem. She was so excited she started taking photos of it and sending it to family. Checked a few photos on the desktop, etc... A small bubble appeared from the menu bar stating that some malware was detected and asked if I wanted to connect to microsoft to download some tools to correct the problem (yeah right). So I figured it might be a good idea to download Malbytewares and do a quick scan.

Well no more than 1 minute after that, I put my hands on it and was asking if it had a wireless card or if we needed to plug in an ethernet cable. No sooner had I said it, received a BSOD. When it had rebooted, receiving the "BOOTABLE DISK NOT FOUND..." error message and figured that.the virus got the best of the MBR or something similar.

Starting running some disk utilities I had... one of them a GUI cheapo AV I had lying around, and the thing was in an endless reboot cycle saying it didn't have enough memory. I then tried another boot utilities and realized the HDD wasn't seen whatsoever.

Jumped to BIOS and the HDD was no longer seen at all. Only options for the Primary Drive was "None" and "Disabled".
Uh oh.

So I took apart the case for the IDE HD, and inspected it, reseated it. Same thing.

I then decided to see if the HDD was bricked entirely - so I bought a IDE to USB2 converter box, and plugged it into a computer from this decade. Seems it could see it, how the meager 20GB harddrive was partitioned into a 4GB segment for the XP install and the massive remaining 16GB for data. Ran a few virus checked and the poor thing was pretty infested with malware all over on both partitions. Several significant XP system32 files were infected and deleted... so clearly this thing wouldn't boot again without some repair action.

So now that I had the HDD confirmed operational and malware free, brought it back to the L2000E and reseated and went into BIOS.

Now instead of "None", it literally was blank. So I could select either a blank field, or "Disabled". Quite funky.

I tried several different ways to reboot it, use other utiltiies to see if I could boot and see it but no dice.

So given I'm guessing that the BIOS chip is down for the count, figured I couldn't give up yet seeing how excited the lady was to see her old trusted steed from college give some semblance ... decided to post here to see if maybe, just maybe there is some life to this baby yet.

My questions:

Is the fact the BIOS sees the HDD as "blank" a good sign, and not an indication it's entirely dead?

Going to support.asus.com I manually selected the model and went notebook -> L2000 series, then found only L2E. So there isn't another selection I missed? Meaning L2000E = L2E?

Would a BIOS reflash be a possibility? Current version was v05 and saw v07 online. Although it is so old, no documentation to see what the difference between the 2 would be.

Only BIOS flash utility I saw was a reference in the OM about using WinFlash. As WinFlash is clearly not an option, any other utility / way I could try to flash it? I saw on the BIOS forum page something about AFLASH - a DOS boot util - but saw it also had to be model specific. Option?

A few of the specs - just for nostalgia:
Mobile Intel Celeron CPU 1500 MHz
250MB RAM
SiS 650+962L/L2EU chipset (dated: 01/03/2003)
BIOS rev 0105
DVD/CDRW - functional
20GB IDE Toshiba HDD

Cheers everyone, and thanks for burning 5 minutes of your life to read through this (which I wish was a short as I've spent with this machine and writing it up)!
ped

ped Notebook Guru

Prostar Computer Company Representative