[wplug] Fried by static?

[Scott F. Kiesling]

Hi Folks-

I zapped my laptop today with static (I think). Fortunately,
most things are still running OK, and there was no loss of
data (and backups are up to date anyway), but there are some
weird things going on, and I'm not sure I really even know
where to start to try to fix it. I'd appreciate any ideas
anyone can offer, even advice on whether I should just call
IBM.

Here's the summary..

Machine and distro: IBM T42, Gentoo

Problems:
BIOS seems to have done some weird resetting:
	Time was reset after zap
	Tries to netboot
No sound -- "can't find /dev/dsp"
No USB (when trying to mount a USB drive, I get " special
	device /dev/sda1 does not exist"

What happened:
After the zap, the machine went dark. (Panic.) Couldn't turn
it on. I unplugged everything and removed the battery.
Reinserted the battery and got power. Machine told me there
was an error, the date needed to be checked and
automatically went into the BIOS setup. I reset the time and
rebooted. Got some new messages at first but then got the
GRUB screen and all seemed to go well (except that the time
was off).

At startup, I can't find anything that tells me there is a
problem.

Thanks in advance
Scott

-- 
Scott F. Kiesling, PhD

Assistant Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Linguistics 

Email: kiesling-at-pitt-dot-edu
Web: http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/skpage.html

University of Pittsburgh    
2816 Cathedral of Learning     Phone: 1-412-624-5916
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA       Fax: 1-412-624-6130