In the diagnosis of large-scale mechanic-electronic-hydraulic control system, and for the mathematical model was hard to build and the historic fault data was short, a hybrid fault diagnosis method based on virtual prototyping and PNN (probabilistic neural network) was proposed. Virtual prototyping was first built and its credibility was validated. On this basis, fault injection and simulation were conducted to obtain fault data, which was then extracted as fault features and trained by PNN to form diagnosis knowledge library. A case study of steering system was presented to verify the correctness of the proposed method, which shows that the accuracy of fault detection and isolation is high and the rate of false/missing alarm is low. The proposed method may bring a novel idea for the fault diagnosis of large-scale and complicated mechanic-electronichydraulic control system.