No one repied to my request for help, so I'm re-posting my query. If no
one can help me directly, a pointer to perhaps a more appropriate list for
the Q would be appreciated, thanks.
I have a P266 laptop which has died and would appreciate some advice as to
how to mend or modify it to get more life out of it.
It's a Medion Lifetec with floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, 3GB HD and 96MB
SDRAM.
The fault began as a blue screen of death message saying can't write to
HD, a fault which would clear itself, but became more persistent,
eventually trashing the OS. When checked out with QuickTech Pro running
out of a boot floppy the entire machine is fine, and either the HD checks
out fully, or it fails to recognise its existence at all, putting up error
code 4E. Anyone know what that means?
Latterly it won't recognise the HD at all.
The HD has been swapped out with a known good one, and when recognised at
all the 3GB original has always checked out, so I don't suspect the HD
itself.
The BIOS allows booting from CD or floppy, but no other device. There are
2 USB ports and PCMCIA slots.
Ideally I would like full function back, but failing that I would like to
be able to continue to use the machine at least as a portable photo
viewer, which had been one of its main uses. It occurs to me that As I
have an external HD which uses the USB port I might be able to put an OS
on this and hand over to it from a floppy or CDROM boot up, but I don't
know how to go about this.
Does anyone knows how to do this? It's important to stress that this
isn't a floppy boot up into the internal C: drive, as that part of the
machine is defunct, but a boot up straight into an OS on an external drive
through the USB port.
I have been advised that the machine is uneconomical to repair (isn't
everything these days?!) given that the fault is likely to be something on
the motherboard, but that's still uncertain.
I have Windows 95, 98, and xp.
Any way forward will be much appreciated.
Thanks, Neil Taylor
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