need help big time.!!!!

[glenmcdonald]

i recently purchased a dell optiplex gx1 with a p111 533 and 15g hd and 256m ram ,cdrom and floppy. this is a computer that we are giving my motherinlaw to play solitaire and ocasional internet /e-mail use. here is my prob. i installed win98se on it all was fine. i then installed a v-92 56k modem into the pci slot. when i tried to detect the modem i was unsuccessfull in both slots with the driver on cdrom. i then removed the modem and went to re-boot, got to the win98 start screen but no further. the hard drive just ran on and on until an error message popped up saying problems reading. i then put in a floppy boot disk to get to dos prompt at least. when i tried to switch over to hard drive (c it came up not readable. so this is my quandry.....any help would be appreciated.

 

[ibbonkers]

sounds like a dead hard drive to me. theyre pretty cheap these days.

 

[wxt38]

maybe your computer is too old that you need a new one. i mean i got problems too when i tried to add a network card to my old compaq, the window recognize there's a new hardware but then an error message showed up after that.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Put the 98 floppy in boot without cdrom support and then type scandisk. But the hard drive does sound like its toast.

 

[Nitestick]

pull the card. sometimes a really messed up pci expansion card can totally mess your system over and i would say it is not coincidence that this happened straight after you put the card in. i have had pci cards stop pc's from booting amongst other really messed up things

 

[glenmcdonald]

thanks all i ended up return the box for a new one. appreciate the help