Hi
I wonder if anyone has any ideas what might be going on here. I was working on my gateway 486 dx. It has an anagma mobo with a soldered in phoenix bios.
I installed win 3.11 over dos 6.
Then tried to install the windows drivers for my aztech mm16 pro. This is from the disks that came with it in the box, though the first time I've run the widows setup, dos was fine.
It hung, and the first time I aborted, it corrupted my Auto exec etc so I restored them and tried again.
This time it went a bit further to the point of asking if I wanted to use the onboard CD connector, and then froze again.
Rebooting into dos, something fishy has happened to the name of my windows directory (see linked images).

http://imgur.com/gallery/pX6ZvFD

I figured some kind of malware and thought if I resinstall windows to a fresh directory I can just use that to delete the new mad character filename of the old corrupt directory. Dos wouldn't allow it.
That went fine until I went in and tried to delete it, it wouldn't let me in windows either so some kind of file orivilidges have been applied.
Then I decided best to wipe the HD and start again but the problems really start here.
Rebooting give me a checksum error as if the dallas chip battery is dead.
Trying to get into the bios now results in either a plain grey screen or sometimes a little red message as on the pics.
I also get random memory errors and can't boot from a floppy.
So I'm thinking I either have some kind of bios infection (if such a thing existed back then) or I've coincidentally somehow wrecked my bios at the same time as the other dodgy behaviour showed up.
Any ideas or thoughts will be gratefully received.
It's my favourite pc 🙁