hi David, terribly sorry on two counts.(1)posting to the wrong forum(2)messing up the contents of the post and making it unreadable.

Perhaps i have an excuse for (2)what happened was that because i type with only the fore finger it took quite a while to type the whole msg and by that time i had timed out and susequently the server went down for sometime and so i lost my msg

then i typed and pasted from word and possibly because of the difference in page set up sizes between word and the online post widow the whole thing seems to have got garbled. sorry again and i am re posting.

Hi all list members,My 5 year old celeron 667 mhz cpu decided to go to heaven and so I bought a new ASUS mobo model P4GE-MX and celeron D CPU  and connected everything,installed the drivers from the mobo cd and powered after making sure that all the jumper settings were ok.

The bios  screen showed primary master=my old Maxtor hdd with win 98se and all my data,slave=my old lg cd rom,secondary master=my old sony dvd player, secondary slave=my old Samsung cdrw. Floppy=ok

.However when I went into device manager it showed up only the hdd as storage device and lg cdrom under cd rom.in other words windows did not detect my dvd player and cdrw.so I fiddled around for nearly 3 days and suddenly yesterday my screen froze at the win logo and would not load the os.
So I put in the free pc tech boot disk and my win 98se cd and got to the set up stage after nearly one hour of scan of file structure,file system, memory, free space, cross linked files etc etc by windows scan disk and after a few “nexts”windows said that I don’t have enough memory and I should free up some space.
My problem (1) how do I get into my c drive to free space?c:\dir command scrolled up so fast that I could see only the last 15 or so files out of a total 390 at the end.up/dn arrows or scroll lock did not help in enabling me to see files from the start.
Prob(2) how do I go to the beginning of the dir?in other words how do I free space without being able to get into c drive?could it be that my scroll lock is non functional?I know my c drive is chalkablock with only about 70/80 mb space left
.Prob(3) was windows not able to detect my dvdplayer,cdrom in the first instance(the bios did) because the earlier  drive config(which I don’t remember) was in windows memory and my current drive config is different?
Prob(4) am I right in assuming that in non colour coded ide cable connectors any one can go into the mobo, the last one at the end of the cable is MASTER and the middle one is the SLAVE?this is how I have connected the drives now.
 In case formatting is the only answer can I transfer my data in the hdd to the hdd in the DELL pc which also I have and if so how do I connect the two pcs together and effect the transfer?
 I am terribly sorry for the lengthy post and hope I have given enough info.any help will be greatly appreciated and have a very nice day and God bless all.  Venkat viswanathan

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