Basic startup question...

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JJDChE

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My aunt gave me her Dell Optiplex GX150 and told me it has a bad mobo and apparently she belives it has something to do with a recently installed hard drive. I brought it home and started it up, it went through the "BIOS screen" (don't know the technical term, where it says DELL in huge letters and you can enter the setup screen), then the windows 98 "sky screen" momentarily flashes (~a tenth of a second) and I get a 'C:\' prompt. Thats it, any idea where to go from there?

Also, I don't know much about the hardware end of computers, but at this point it doesn't seem like there is a problem with the motherboard.
 
See what kind of Hard Drive is in it and go to the manufacture website.Download the Proper Utility to troubleshoot the hard drive.Check the drive see if you can find some errors with the drive itself.If it checks out ok i would write zero`s to the drive and do a fresh install of Windows 98.Try that aproach first.
It doesnt sound like the MB is damaged.
 
Well, I used the PowerMax diagnostic program from the Maxtor website and, lo and behold, it tells me the drive is failing and gave me a diagnostic code to contact Maxtor with. The manufacture date on the case says Dec 2003, so there should still be a warranty on it.
 
jaknlisa619 said:
this one is a good one for microbell, srrry i can't help though

I suppose I'll just get a new drive. Does it appear to you that there may be anything else that I could do? Or could it be another problem with the system?
 
Fdisk it. It might be as simple as a bad windows install. Delete the old patitions and make new patitions. reformat and install win98 again. If you do have a bad hdd then usually you won't be able to formatt the drive. If the hdd won't allow you to formatt it using fdisk. then I'd venture to guess you have a bad hdd. Hdd's are cheap. You can get a 40 gig 7200 WD for around 60.00 to 70.00 bucks.
 
Well the drive reformatted fine, but now when I get to the A:\ prompt and type setup, I get a bad command or filename error. I'm assuming the CDRW drive isn't being recognized. How would I reinstall the drivers?
 
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