Chrissie Posted December 4, 2003 Share Posted December 4, 2003 OK, you all know by now that I'm a computer ignoramus (see the thread about TIME reload disc...) but I feel like a right idiot now:I've got a lovely new Dell XP machine, so felt free to experiment with the old, buggy, tiresome Windows ME machine this evening. Having earlier invested in a Windows Boot disc, courtesy of Ebay, I tried that to see if it would sort my bugs -no, nothing changed. So I reformatted the hard drive, using that disc and the instructions with it. No problem.Then I tried (optimistically) to load the machine with the Windows XP disc that came with the new Dell machine - not too surprised to be told that the CD drive had "invalid disc". Then I tried to load it with Windows 95, using the disc from our even older machine - and was devastated to be given the same message! I really though that one would be OK.So do I have a dead computer? My ideal solution would be to somehow get it reloaded with Windows 98 or thereabouts and use it merely for games/French lessons/ drawngs etc - which the old machine does nicely but is struggling on capacity.HELP!!!! PLEASE!!!Chrissie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Autismuk Posted December 5, 2003 Share Posted December 5, 2003 You may just have a duff CD-Rom drive. Given you can boot from a floppy the basic hardware of the machine sounds okay and it should be useable as a tinkering machine. The problem is without a CDRom drive it is possible to install Windows 95 but it's non trivial to get it copied across. Even if you can do that you won't be able to load many games or apps onto it.Try booting from the floppy again. Does it start the CDRom up as well (it should display a message like Wearnes CD-Rom at 0x140 on H: (entirely dependent on what is in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Put your Win95 CDRom into the drive and type DIR H: (or DIR . What happens ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazan Posted December 6, 2003 Share Posted December 6, 2003 If you have a valid Win9x boot floppy and no bootable Win9x CD then boot with the floppy, run fdisk, then format the c drive, then transfer the system using sys c:Then reboot from the floppy selecting "with cd support" then switch to d: and run Windows setup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrissie Posted December 21, 2003 Author Share Posted December 21, 2003 Well, I thought there just might be a few of you waiting with bated breath to know what WAS the matter with our machine.....The official diagnosis is that there is a problem with the motherboard and so this, the memory and something else (which I couldn't understand) have all to be replaced. Cost in the region of 200 euros. Problem: the case on the TIME machine is marginally narrower than the components he can install, so we also need the whole thing put in a new case.... Cost tba....A big thankyou anyway to all of you who tried to help!Chrissie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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