Right, my PC is a piece of crap. I’m pretty sure it’s a mobo problem. CuriousCanuck has a working box he’s willing to give me - minus the hard drive and display card. The idea is to install my HD into the new box.
Questions:
After installing my HD into the new box, what should I expect on boot-up? Won’t my HD go looking for devices that are no longer there (i.e. the ones installed on this piece of crap computer), and flip out? Should I boot in safe mode instead?
Would it be better to have CC bring the box with his HD in it, then install my HD, switch them to make my HD the master, then remove his HD?
If you put the HD straight in - the Operating system on the HD (assuming it is windows) will start listing plug-and-play devices it’s found and then it will ask you for either the windows disk and/or vendor disks of various peripherals.
I have put ‘used’ HDs in other computer many times and it’s quite straight forward.
It won’t “flip out”, but the OS on your hard drive will go looking for the necessary hardware drivers (ie audio/video/mouse/ etc) in the new box environment when it boots up and if it can’t find them in the onboard driver library files. If the drivers required by the hardware in CC’s box are not onboard you will need to have the OS install disk or the necessary driver files available.
The best thing to do IMO would be to buy a 40-60 gig hard disk for $ 60. or so and install a fresh copy of the OS (XP preferred if you have the horsepower and RAM) on the new hard disk. After the OS sets itself up you can then slave your hard drive to the system and pick off what you want.
This can be done with Win98 and ME easily, I don’t know about NT or 2K, and probably not with XP, but if the computer is old it doesn’t have XP on it anyway (and you ain’t missing much, I am back to 98).
First, you must set the video display to software only, 640x480 resolution. If you do not do this, your PC will try to run the different videocard with the old videocard drivers. Even if you are switching your old videocard, do this anyway. You must do this or you won’t be able to do anything, as the display won’t work at all. If you forget this step, you often can’t just put the HD back into the old computer again–the display settings often suffer some bizarre error and won’t work anymore in any computer–and then you are back to reinstalling the OS. If there are errors on the disk (from the crash caused by attempting to use teh wrong videocard drivers), the OS installer will often insist on reformatting the HD, losing everything on it.
Second, uninstall any device that has an IRQ except for the keyboard and mouse. Do not reboot between devices when it asks you if you want to; the idea is to get rid of them all at once and then shut the old computer down for the last time, so the next time you start up the HD in the new computer it really does “look for everything all over again”.
Cross your fingers. This just doesn’t work every time, but doing these things does help a lot.
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I did this yesterday with Win 2000 - it worked without any hitches whatsoever. It, of course, helped greatly that both boxes were the same model Dell though.
DougC Are you speaking from experience? If so it looks like you had a bad/unlucky one. Believe it or not OSs are quite clever. They will not try to run the different graphics card with the old drivers. They will actually detect that something is wrong and will default to 640x480 and then tell you something is wrong and to please re-install drivers (not in those words). Same goes for other devices.
Another thought, if you’re worried - this is what I did at work last time I changed machines: get hold of a second HD. Set this up as the primary disk of the new PC. Once you’re happy that it is handling the hardware, video, network connections, etc., install the old HD as a secondary drive. Then delete all the OS files from the old HD, and run it HD as your data storage drive.
If the OS is NT/Windows 2000/Windows XP and the motherboards have different chipsets, you’ll likely get a STOP 07b error and the thing won’t even boot up. This is due to different hard drive controller drivers.
To prevent this, switch the IDE controller driver to the generic Standard IDE Controller driver before taking the hard drive out of the old computer. After you put it in the new computer, you can change the controller to the appropriate driver for that motherboard.
The OS on my current PC is Win95. (I’m so embarassed.) I bought it in January 1998, and while I have a Win98SE CD, I was never able to install it, because as I said in the OP, there’s something terribly wrong with this computer. (I’d put in the CD, start the install, and it would hang.)
The processor is a P200 MMX (not bad for early 98, remember). 32 MB RAM. (I tried to insert some extra sticks a friend gave me, but they were probably the wrong kind, cuz it flipped out.)
So yeah, it’s a piece of crap.
Buying a new HD is of course the plan. Does anyone want to comment on my master/slave idea (keeping CC’s HD in, installing mine, and switching them)? How do I install Windows on a freshly-installed HD? Do I need a boot disk? Or boot from the CD?
There are lots of ways you can go Scott, but given your described scenario and the fact that your hard drive is currently an older, and potentially flaky Win95 install, your best bet (IMO) is to start with a fresh hard drive (ie blank formatted) OS install appropriate to the hardware CC is giving you (what is the CC donated hardware BTW?) and slave your 95 drive to the master drive to puck your data off.
Per your last question I can’t really see the benefit regarding the method you describe, as Windows typically wants to install to the primary master boot drive, so even if you could convince it to do an install to the secondary “D:” drive I don’t see how having CC’s drive still in the system is going to “help” you install windows and in fact it would probably complicate the process.
Basic procedure with single hard disk -
1: Use CC’s (or anyones) Win 98 PC to make a windows 98 boot disk via the Win 98 Control Panel’s “make a boot disk” applet
2: Boot the new system with the aforesaid boot floppy and format the target disk with the “Format c: /s” command. There is a blank space between “c: and /s” in this command string. Complete format.
3: Turn off PC and remove all un-necessary PCI or ISA cards from the system that you will not need or otherwise not be be using in your setup.
4: Re-boot with boot floppy and Win98se CD in CD drive. If Win98se install is an “upgrade” disk vs a full install disk (it will say on the CD) you will need to have a copy of a Win95 CD or Win95 floppy disk set available for it to verify and continue install.
5: Go to the d:\ or e:\ win98 directory on the CD and type in “start” or “setup” (I forget which) and the install will initiate.
6: Have audio, video, modem and other drivers available on separate CD or floppy as system will likely ask for them at some point. If you can’t get them elsewhere www.driverguide.com has many, many hardware drivers for various OSes. Use “drivers” as the userid and “all” as the password to get in.
7: Complete install. Jumper Win95 drive as slave and attach it to system as secondary drive.
Right, well I don’t think I’ll be able to buy a new HD for a couple of weeks. So let’s say we’re working just with my current HD. How should I proceed? Uninstall device drivers from the system now, before installing this HD into the new box?
Boot up CC’s full system. Create Win98 boot floppy. Shut down, switch his HD for mine. Reboot with Win98 boot floopy. Install Win98 from CD. Let it look for drivers.
Install your 95 disk and let Win 95 come up as best it can then install 98. If hardware was the hangup for the previous install glitches the new hardware might solve the problem and allow the install. Win 98se wil take considerable more data and drive scrolling space then 95 so be sure you have enough free drive space before starting.
We’re headed to opinion-land here, but considering that you want to preserve the contents at all costs, AND you are running Win95, I’d say to save up for another hard drive, remove the old one completely, install the new HD alone and put Win98 on that, then reconnect the old as a slave. Win95 doesn’t automatically try to detect evetything the way 98 does, and you’ll get BIOS system erors and so on, probably screw up the FAT and then the show’s over.
In my past experience, switching the video to software-only, 640x480 is almost necessary, particularly when changing the videocard or switching a HD to a computer with a different videocard. Uninstalling the other stuff I mentioned helps in 98 or later, but YMMV.
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