Dinosaur Computer - Problems

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

So my rents have this computer from their office, an old PII system running on 64 megs of ram. I've installed XP on weaker specs and it ran fine so they decided to have XP installed on it and then donate it to some poor family.

Initially it had Windows 98 on it, but I booted up the XP CD and had the 6gig hdd quick formatted. It got to the XP setup screen, but I had to manually close the computer because we had an appointment to make and I decided to bring it home to work on it.

At home, I disassembled it completely and reassembled it for curiosity's sake and to fix a rattling problem which was simply a cord hitting the psu fan. So I start it up, and none of the IDE devices can be detected! I checked the jumpers on the hdd and cd-drive and tried various combinations. In the end, what made sense to me was, having the hdd on the primary IDE channel set to single and plugged on the top master position on the IDE cable. As for the cd-drive, i have it jumped on cable-select, plugged into the secondary IDE channel to the master IDE cable plug.

Still doesn't detect **** except the floppy drive is detected and is running fine on a seperate IDE channel called "Floppy" (its printed floppy directly on the motherboard under the IDE channel, the IDE plug itself is smaller than the reguar IDE plugs. This is an old motherboard, a Foxconn I believe.. I took the hard drive and put it into my newer system under primary master and jumped to default factory "single" setting, not the alternative "single" setting. It detects it perfectly, however, after putting back into the older computer still nothing. Primary master and slave, and secondary master and slave are not detected at all.

I thought maybe the molex connectors were faulty, so I ran a molex connector from the psu of my newer computer onto the old hdd and still, no detection.

I'm speculating that maybe it has to do with these wired jumper things on the bottom right-hand side of the motherboard, you know the stuff for the power switch and reset button? They're labeled pwr sw, reset sw, hdd led, power led and audio (that one connects to and old school internal speaker which I removed completely) I'm pretty sure I had no clue how to attach those things, I just kept on testing it out until the power and reset switches worked. Do you think this matters at all?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[vpx_rodder]

That shouldn't matter i wouldnt think.... you can always go online and type in the model of the mb to get a pin diagram to make sure everything is hooked up right.

 

[Law]

It sounds like the HD is Ok, most likely you may have set the jumper incorrectly or plug the IDE cable incorrectly. There is a red line on the IDE cable, make sure that line is closest to the molex plug. Try using another IDE cable. It could just be bad IDE cables. Make sure the jumpers aren't bad too.

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

Thanks for the input. I have this thread running in another forum, I'm going to post my response in a second, see what you guys here can make of it. Again, I really appreciate this.

<div class=note2><b>Quote:</b> (Goobs @ May 23 2007, 09:55 AM)<br><br>On older systems you had to go into the bios and either input the drive specifications or choose "auto" to automatically detect the harddrive settings, then Save (F10), Exit. Maybe somewhere along the way the setting were lost.
Personally I would try jumping both the harddrive and cd rom to Master and have them on their own IDE channel.</div>

yeah, I tried that and it didn't work. Currently the hdd and the cd are both set to master and each have their own channel and own cable. I have it already set to "auto" in bios and it doesn't work.

I took some shots of the bios and will upload them in a minute. The first shot is the standard cmos setup with everything set to auto and nothing being detected. the second shot is setting the type to "user" and I get some values under "LANDZ". As you can see, stuff like cylinders and whatnot are set to 0 and it highlights them as if I have to put the values myself. How would I go about doing so?

http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/3218/bios1yl0.jpg
http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/1896/bios2zr8.jpg (little blurry, but readable)

I'm concerned with two scenarios:

1) The IDE plugs are on backwards. The ide plugs have no indication as to which way to go in. They are simply rectangular. My new system has like a shaft on the side of the female and male plug so as to indicate the orientation in which the plug should be plugged in, whereas this old one doesn't.

2) A faulty IDE controller is possible, but I doubt it, because it worked before I took the computer apart and I was extra careful in avoiding static.
Thanks for the input guys. I really appreciate it and I'd really like to have this work out.

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

HAHA! Thanks to the good old computer folk at NCIX, and just as you said Law, I figured out that I'm an idiot and had the IDE plugs on backwards. The red lines were facing the molex plug on the hdd and cd, however, they were backwards down at the motherboard level where they were put on backwards. It now boots up perfectly. Thank you very much, this has made my day.

 

[vpx_rodder]

sweeeeeeeeeet

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

Hey guys, I'm posting from this old beast right now. Check out the KILLER specs on this beast (lol):

It's running REALLY smoothly. I added an old 128mb stick of sdram and it's running like a dream. FireFox is running multiple tabs just fine, StarCraft and Half-Life are running well. Office XP applications are open in 3 seconds, booting up is about 10 seconds. Not half bad, quite impressed with this old hardware.