John W wrote:
> 
> What may be the possible causes of these letters being jumbled?
> Moreover what damage may be involved eg: hardware or
> software/filesystem?

Probably "only" the entire filesystem being corrupted horribly...
however, it seems to me I remember something about certain IDE HDs
actually becoming dead to the world (until a special proprietary
utility is run on them) if certain pieces of their config is
overwritten. I remember this from the days of 40 and 80MB HDs tho, so
I have no idea if they still have this vulnerability or not.

-- 
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