2 Hard Drive problems... Win98 and Win xp

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Computerfreak14

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Problem 1 - okay well heres my problem...today my sister told me her pc was lagging bad and her internet stopped working. So what i did was try to do some spyware scans and stuff but it just lagged forever.

So one of my brilliant ideas was to take out her hard drive and insert it in to mine...why you ask..be casue he pc only has a 15 gig HD and 96MB of ram..bad i know..plus windows XP but my sister didnt mind it..just used it for AIM...

So i took it out and hooked it up to my dell..tryed booting it and i recieved a message..."Operating System Not Found" So i thought thats not good.. But when i inserted it back into her pc it said the same thing..** Also BIOS Will not recongize wether its a slave drive or master..So what can i do to atleast be able to still use it..not worried about losing her files ECT

Problem 2 - next i remembered that i had a 10 gig HD with Windows 98 se so i tryed booting from that HD it will come to the loading screen but after that when the desktop is suppose to come up theres just a little dash that blinks in the top left corner..

Tryed resetting the CMOS battery i tihnk its called

But im stuck and would like to really save either hard drive..low on cash for a new one..any way to do a fresh install of 98..
i tryed to reinstall win98 but it said theres not enought space..how can i cler the HD to start from scratch..

Sorry for the lenght..also if you need more info let me know
Thanks your pc friend steve:D :angry:
 
If the BIOS can't tell weather the drive is a master or slave, did you check the jumper settings. Put them on the cable select jumper setting (look on the top of the drive for a diagram of the settings) and if you have one drive make sure it's at the very end of the ribbon cable so there's one more adapter in the middle of it, unused. If that doesn't work for the detection then just set the drive to master and see if that works. Make sure the HDD is plugged into the primary IDE channel (should say right on the mobo next to the channels). CD drives in secondary, and floppy in the floppy IDE channel. Chances are, the hard drive lost some important information needed to boot and may need to be reformatted. My guess is that it isn't a hige deal since your sister has such a tiny drive and only uses AIM on it.

As for your problem, can you boot into safe mode? If you can, it may be a driver failure or spyware. If you have adaware removal tools (hopefully you do) then run those in safe mode.

If you can boot into safe mode just fine and the spyware removal doesn't seem to work, don't reformat your drive quite yet... if it's really going to be a hassle for you. If you don't really care about losing your information then you might want to reformat. Can you get into the setup of windows 98 and get the option of formatting your drive? If you can and you want to reformat your drive, will it at least allow you to reformat? If so and your not afraid of losing all information, format the drive so that there is nothing but a blank, raw partition, and that there is nothing but unallocated space. A 15 gig drive is plenty of room to install windows 98 on. Also make sure there are no floppy's in your drive.

These are just some simple ideas for troubleshooting. If none of these work, post back with a reply.
 
well im goin to get it sometime before the weeks over...but how would i go about installing windows xp pro sp2 LITE...i got it off Bittorrent..but would i need a boot disk or something..someone shed some light thanks
 
you'd better put on a good antivirus...the torrents can have many viruses on them, i have had bad experience with that...
 
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