On 22 Nov 2005 at 17:46, Amy Ledford wrote:

> Hi guys!
>
> Got another problem! I was given a computer that
> originally had Win95 on it. I was going to give it
> away after upgrading the OS to Win98. At first I could
> not get the floppy drive to work, so I took the hard
> drive out and connected it in place of my hard drive.
> From that point it was not being recognized, and it
> didn't matter which computer I tried it in. In my
> computer my harddrive works fine. So I took it to my
> stepfather, the unofficial expert in PC repairs. He
> too was unable to get either his or the original PC to
> recognize it. So, I bought another HD from someone on
> ebay, It too doesnot  work in any of the 3 PCs. I
> installed the ebay HD in my PC first, and it did
> exactly the same as the first one. Thinking I had done
> something wrong, I took it to my stepfather, he had
> same issue. Neither of us have tried to install our
> WinXP HDs in the original PC. (I'm a little skerred
> to!) What are the chances of both HDs going bad
> suddenly?!  HELP Please!

I don't know which country you are from, or what the spec of the computer
in question is?  I wouldn't mess with your running xp machines, as the HDs
would 'detect new hardware' and xp is set up to be intollerant of much
hardware change on an original install.

When you put the HD in place of the one in 'your' machine, did you enter
the BIOS and get it to recognise the new drive, its size, number of
cylinders, etc?  If you did then it may be that you need to alter the
jumpers on it to re-set it from primary master to secondary slave, putting
it on the same ribbon as your c: drive rather than swopping it out.  How
to do this can be discovered by downloading the manual for that HD from
the internet.

But I'm confused as to why your response to the floppy drive not working
was to take the HD out?  Why not swop out the floppy drive?

Thinking laterally, where I live in the UK, PIII's are being given away
(I've just been given one), they can be otained also from the local
council tip, and on the 'freecycle' network, where P700s and up to 19inch
monitors are also being given away as folk upgrade to LCDs.  In other
words, it may be possible that a Win95 machine isn't worth the effort and
expense you're investing in it if what you're trying to do is set
something up for a friend?

It seems a very short time ago that I bought a USB card for my first P200
home build, and now I get given a P500 base unit with USB as standard,
256MB RAM, 64MB graphics card etc, completely eclipsing that machine.

So I would take a look at what people are throwing away now, it might
surprise you.  Rubbish is upgrading itself at a surprising pace!

Neil Taylor

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