trickedbullet
Beta member
- Messages
- 2
I have an old Compaq Presario 5bw160 computer running at 700mhz with 128mb of ram. It is using a chip based cpu not slot type. It also has a 20g hard drive and a cd burner and cdrom drive as well as a floppy drive. It has a 125w power supply. It came with windows 98 or 98se (not sure).
I was told that the computer was fried by somebody with far less if not any experience with computers. I have some experience. When I first turned it on and made sure that everything was connected properly, I heard a very loud grinding noise coming from the hard drive. The computer then gives me a general hardware failure error. I concluded that the hard drive was shot and set it aside. The ram, cpu, and everything else seem to be working, kinda.
I then tried using a hard drive that I know works and had xp pro on it. It booted up and sat at a black screen or just kept retarting. I was then told that the bios probably does not support xp and would have to be updated. So I took an identical hard drive that also was working fine and put windows 98se on it. Everything went well, up untill the point where windows wants to install the drivers for hardware devices at the very beginning of start up. This is the point after where windows is installed. It restarts and shows the windows 98 screen, then went to the admin password screen. I left pass blank then it started looking for hardware. It gets to MPU-401 in the found new hardware screen and then just restarts. Just boom restarts. There is an audible pop sound when the restart occurs through the speakers.
After the restart it runs scandisk very quickly and boots up 98 again. It then pulls up the found new hardware screen then the MPU-401 thing and repeats it self over and over again. I tried another power supply to see if it might be the prob, but nope, thats not it. I can however get into the bios still and do all the partitioning stuff and so forth.
Does any one know whats wrong? Is the motherboard dead?
Thanks in advance.
I was told that the computer was fried by somebody with far less if not any experience with computers. I have some experience. When I first turned it on and made sure that everything was connected properly, I heard a very loud grinding noise coming from the hard drive. The computer then gives me a general hardware failure error. I concluded that the hard drive was shot and set it aside. The ram, cpu, and everything else seem to be working, kinda.
I then tried using a hard drive that I know works and had xp pro on it. It booted up and sat at a black screen or just kept retarting. I was then told that the bios probably does not support xp and would have to be updated. So I took an identical hard drive that also was working fine and put windows 98se on it. Everything went well, up untill the point where windows wants to install the drivers for hardware devices at the very beginning of start up. This is the point after where windows is installed. It restarts and shows the windows 98 screen, then went to the admin password screen. I left pass blank then it started looking for hardware. It gets to MPU-401 in the found new hardware screen and then just restarts. Just boom restarts. There is an audible pop sound when the restart occurs through the speakers.
After the restart it runs scandisk very quickly and boots up 98 again. It then pulls up the found new hardware screen then the MPU-401 thing and repeats it self over and over again. I tried another power supply to see if it might be the prob, but nope, thats not it. I can however get into the bios still and do all the partitioning stuff and so forth.
Does any one know whats wrong? Is the motherboard dead?
Thanks in advance.