At 19:20 03/09/04, Diane Duncan wrote:
>This is kind of an addendum to the thread of trying to get a
>hard drive recognized in an older pc.
>
>If when I push a key, any key, when the black terminal says no
>operating system found...and the floppy drive light goes on and
>that floppy drive sound sounds and the bios is set to auto
>configuration and I've fiddled with IDE cables... All the help
>from this list indicates a HD failure, would you say it'd be
>prudent to accept that this HD is kaput?
>
>I also have a Pentium box that does work (it's running Win95)
>and I'd like to erase the drive and load linux and play. The box
>cover doesn't just come off, so I can't get inside easily to look
>at stuff. Should I just start unscrewing screws to get in there,
>or is there a better way? Actually, if I put the really old HD
>from the Pentium into the old P2 with the kaput HD, would that
>work...relatively easily?


Hi Diane

Are you sure that it's not just that the hard drive has been
erased? Maybe the original owner (insurance office?) wiped the
hard drive for security reasons. (If the hard drive is working
but doesn't contain an operating system, you'd see just the
message at boot that you're seeing now.)

Can you boot off a floppy diskette? If so, you can do the
following to see if the hard drive is potentially functional.

Create a Windows Startup diskette using your working computer.
(You create a Win98 Startup Diskette by going to Control Panel,
then Add/Remove Programs, then Startup Disk, then Create Disk.
It's probably the same with Win95.)

Put this diskette in the floppy drive of the problem computer
and see if the computer boots to Windows DOS Mode. If so, type

FDISK

right after the A:\> prompt and then hit <Enter>.

See if the hard drive is recognized. Do this by choosing
"Display Partition Information" from the FDISK main menu.
It will tell you if there's no working hard drive present.
If Fdisk sees the hard drive, let us know!!!!

As for the computer with the box that won't open. Could you
describe it? Some of these don't use screws (to hold the top
or sides in place), some do. You don't want to remove the
screws that hold the power supply or fans in place...so be
careful. But it should be clear which screws just hold the
sides of the computer in place and which hold the power supply
(for example) in place.

By the way, was the lithium battery on the motherboard of your
P133 computer okay? Was the function key "F1" the key to get
into "BIOS Setup"?

And yes, you could switch hard drives from the Win95 computer
to the older one...but when you boot the old computer with the
working hard drive, all the "new" hardware in the computer will
be detected by Windows. So you'll end up with Windows running
with hardware settings (left over) from the previous computer
(in Device Manager and the registry) plus (after lots of
detecting and rebooting) all the hardware in the present (older)
computer. It may be difficult to get the correct devices working.

So it's best to run windows one last time (before removing
the hard drive in order to move it to the older computer) and
"remove" all the hardware devices from Device Manager (or better,
the registry) so that you start with a clean slate (only the
"newly detected" hardware) after you transfer the disk drive.
This is not difficult...*if* you've done it once or twice on
other computers. My advice would be to first make sure that the
hard drive really is dead...not just lacking an operating system.
You don't want to end up with two computers that don't run
Windows.

Regards,
Bill

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