Hard Drive format

[ClayEM]

I'm trying to make an old PC (acquired without a HD) produce again.
I have several IDE HD's and elected to use one of them in the PC (Micro ATX Professional V800 is the description on its name plate).
I haven't been able to make the PC work and wondered if I should prepare the HD in some way to get it to be seen by the PC.
I have the feeling that the problem is not the HD, but need some reinforcement.
Trying to boot the PC from a Windows installation disk does not work.

So I decided to hear from the helpful TS folks.

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated.

Clay

[kbeartx]

How large is the drive?

How old is the peasea?

I had one old peasea that could not use any HD larger than 10GB as its boot drive, and another that needed specific Config [BIOS] settings in order to see the whole of a 30GB drive, [something about enabling LMB support] and as always, make sure to check the IDE jumper settings so that the drive is set to Master or Slave [depending on the manufacturer and model, there is quite likely an optical drive sharing the bus that must be taken into account re: Mater/Slave settings].

 

[Parker]

I take it that you are doing a fresh install on the OS on the PC.

Ok...
here's the deal

pop in the Windows CD's into the drive (you're going to need to install windows anyway...)
Then in your bios select to boot to CD (push like F12 or whatever will get the boot menu up to select CD. If CD is already above hard drive, it will just ask you "Press any key to boot from CD" or something like that)

Go through the windows prompts
i believe after you press F8 to agree to the licensing agreement, it will give you the option to partition and reformat the drive. What you want to do is go into the partitioning part, delete the partition, and then re-partition and format the drive.

Then it's basically self-explanitory (and this is the easiest windows will ever be!!)

Cheers,
Parker

[RHPConsult]

WHOOPS! After you complete that task (keeping this post technical, donchasee), have a Happy Belated Birthday (yesterday), Clay. Best wishes from the Left Coast

[ClayEM]

Thanks Dick.....

The PC is/was a discarded 800 MHz Gateway with no HD or monitor.

I put a 200GB Seagate in it... at first the installation CD I tried could not be seen by the PC. Later I tried a different installation CD and it worked, although I had preformatted the HD as Fat 32 (or whatever) and after installing the Windows system, it wouldn't work. Then, from the installation disk, I reformatted the HD to NTSC (or whatever)...this took a long time (about 2 hours) and another hour for the system to install...and it worked!!

Now I'm in the process of trying to get internet dialup to work. Plugging a phone line into the PC gets nothing but a disabled phone system.

Knowing practically nothing about PC's, and suspecting a bad modem (a 3COM internal), I called the place I got the PC and was told that the modem might be bad but it was probably in need of a Driver for the modem.

So, I removed the modem (to get model#, etc.) and downloaded Drivers from the 3COM site to my Mac, made a disk image and burned it to a CD-RW. Next step is to see if the PC will see my CD-RW and if I can install the Drivers from it. The 3COM site gave a very complicated sounding procedure for making an installation CD, but I'm a Mac man and things aren't nearly as complicated with a Mac.

And excuse me for seeking PC help here...I just don't really want to go to a PC forum and I know a lot of TS'ers have a PC connection.

Wish me luck,
Clay

[Paddy]

Good luck, Clay! I've brought a number of PeeCees back from the dead as you're doing, though not for a few years now, ever since Andover's recycling committee stopped people from "picking" through the dropped-off electronics on their twice-a-year recycling days - made me mad, since all they were doing was sending the stuff off to be crushed and sorted - not reused. I talked to the contractors doing the collections - they don't "rescue" anything for reuse. I got a lot of great stuff there, including about 10 Macs which I refurbished and donated, and several PCs - and the then 2-year old Sony VCR which we still own. Its former (lunatic) owner turned it in because he had LOST THE REMOTE! (I asked him if it worked and he told me why he was turning it in!) Yeah, let's ditch the $150 VCR instead of buying a new $10 remote. Makes lots of sense to me.

It does make you wonder how many reasonably useful and functioning computers and other electronica are just dumped in the trash, or sitting in attics.

[ClayEM]

Success!
The original modem was an Ethernet modem and couldn't possibly connect to a phone line. It had an RJ-45 connector plug and the phone line has an RJ-11 connector. The smaller RJ-11 actually seemed to connect okay, but all it did was disable the phone service. Took me a while to sort all this out.

I contacted the place I got the computer from and they graciously provided me with two PCI modems (no charge). The first one I tried wouldn't work...it wasn't compatible with Windows XP...but the second one worked okay.

So now for only $60 and a lot of my time (not worth a whole lot), my sister has a fairly fast PC (800 MHz) that she can use for email and web surfing. She had been trying to use my first Mac...an old Performa 6200 (75MHz). It just plain flat wouldn't work...The browser's home page would never finish loading when trying to connect to the web.

Clay
 

[tacit]

QUOTE(ClayEM @ Oct 25 2007, 01:19 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So now for only $60 and a lot of my time (not worth a whole lot), my sister has a fairly fast PC (800 MHz) that she can use for email and web surfing. She had been trying to use my first Mac...an old Performa 6200 (75MHz). It just plain flat wouldn't work...The browser's home page would never finish loading when trying to connect to the web.

Well, at least you learned some things from the experience, yes?

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but 800 MHz is not a fairly fast PC; in Mac terms, it's about up there with a PowerPC 604-based system, before the days of the G3. Systems like this usually sell for $5-$15. I saw an 880 MHz system at a thrift store recently (I'm in the market for a new PC for Shelly); they wanted $25 for it, and I didn't take it.