Hi Mr. Gillet,

Many thanks for this reply in answer to my plea for help.  As you can
tell I'm not all that knowledgeable in computer matters - although I'm
learning more and more every day with the help provided by Freepctech.

I had thought that there was a way to force the computer to boot from a
particular drive, but if not, then could I just replace the good drive in
the W-95 machine with the suspect drive from the W-Me machine?  The OS is
on the drive so it should boot into W-Me and if the problem is software
then it should show up immediately.

Are there flaws in this approach?

Lewis Emerson 

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:23:48 -0800 David Gillett <[log in to unmask]>
writes:
>   These are sort of good diagnostic steps if it really is a hardware 
> 
> problem.  If it's a software problem, it's not going to show up as a 
> slave 
> or USB enclosure, because that's not where the machine is booting 
> from.
> 
>   A similar idea might be to put a fresh hard drive in your machine 
> (and 
> install a clean copy of the OS to that...), and slave the existing 
> drive to 
> it.  You can gradually copy your existing files to the new drive 
> (generally 
> it will be better to reinstall applications rather than try to move 
> them), 
> and at some point when you've salvaged everything you need, reformat 
> the old 
> drive.
> 
>   [If it's a motherboard problem, it will show up with the new drive 
> as 
> well, and then you'll know.]
> 
> David Gillett
> 
> 
> On 13 Feb 2006 at 19:42, Lewis c Emerson wrote:
> 
> > Folks,
> > 
> > I've been frustrated for many month with a sick computer (Athelon 
> 900 MHz
> > CPU running Windows-Me)  that kept freezing up more and more 
> frequently
> > and finally became just too much trouble to keep trying to reboot 
> again
> > and again for the very few times that it actually would be usable 
> for
> > short periods before freezing again.  I took it to a local repair 
> shop
> > and paid them $30 for their info that they couldn't get it to boot 
> either
> > after some unknown attempts to get it up and running.  All that I 
> got
> > from them that was positive was that the power supply was OK.  
> They said
> > it might be the motherboard or a software problem. 
> > 
> > Here's my idea as to how to isolate the problem - so will ask for
> > comments. 
> > 
> > Idea #1 - Remove the hard drive from the sick machine and slave it 
> to the
> > hard drive in my older Windows-95 machine (with a Pentium CPU) and 
> see if
> > the problem also appears here - if not, the problem  would be the
> > motherboard or associated hardware in the W-Me machine.  If it 
> causes the
> > same problem (freeze ups) in the W-95 machine it would be 
> something on
> > the hard drive from the W-Me machine. 
> > 
> > Idea #2. - Do essentially the same thing, but instead of slaving 
> the W-Me
> > hard drive to the one in the W-95 machine, buy a hard drive USB 
> "cage"
> > and put the W-95 hard drive in the cage connected to the W-Me 
> machine and
> > see what happens.
> > 
> > I guess I'm displaying my ignorance here, but hate to give up what 
> I
> > already have on hand and, there are a few things on the W-Me hard 
> drive
> > that I'd like to recover.
> > 
> > If either of these ideas are kuku can one of you kind folks 
> suggest what
> > in-house diagnostics I might perform here without additional 
> costs.  I'm
> > kinda elderly and can't spend too much on this. 
> > 
> > Many thanks,
> > 
> > Lewis Emerson
> > 
> >          PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
> >                      visit our download web page at:
> >                   http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml
> 
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>                        Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
> 
> 

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
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