Well I fiddled with every card, dimm, and drive.
It ain’t turning on any time soon.
How would I check to see if the battery is dead?
If your computer gives you nothing but a black screen the battery is not likely the problem.
If you can get to the setup screen any changes you make there will stay until the next time you power down regardless of the battery condition. In other words, if it is a bad battery you can go into setup and reset your options (the hard drive section being the most important…) and get rebooted long enough to write a cd or whatever you need to do, or get a new battery if that is the problem.
holding down the insert key when you power on (on a lot of computers anyway) will clear the cmos to default settings. This can be useful when you do something like setting the processor speed to high and the computer gives only a black screen.
Bullocks. XP boots faster than 98 or Me and runs “everything” as fast as those old POS OSs did (except some old DOS games).
Of course you don’t have any sites. Because it’s BS. Many, many of us at Ars Technica had dual-boot systems for ages for gaming\coding esting\recovery purposes. Because 98 only read FAT-style partitions, all data paritions HAD to be FAT32 ones (i.e. on a system with 3 partitions - 98, XP, and Data - only XP would be NTFS). Neither I nor anyone else I can remember from that site or my personal and professional life had a FAT32 drive “poisoned” by XP. In fact, I just pulled a 98 drive out of a box yesterday, copied a bunch of stuff to an NTFS partition on my XP box, then put the drive in a PC with exactly the same hardware as the first (Dell Optiplex GXa) as before and… no “poisoning”.
Just slap the old drives into the new box, copy the data as needed and take the old drives out. It really is that simple.
Couple of suggestions here:
Easy solution first
How about networking your DELL and FPCB and transfering everything over that way. Ok, it might take a while…but it’s pretty much fail proof and cheap.
Installing Dell HDD as Slave HDD in FPCB computer
A previous poster suggested taking out the Dell HDD and installing it in the FPCB computer as slaves, but the OP was worried about GRUB and had experience with GRUB screwing up when it one drive was taken out. I think this is the quickest solution and I don’t think it is particularly dangerous.
GRUB is essentially a listing of the location of various boot images, and has the function of loading those boot images. I can’t remember the exact syntax but hda(0) would be the first partition on your primary harddrive, hda(1) would be the second, hdb(0) would be the first parititon of your secondary harddrive, and so on. (I know GRUB doesn’t use the syntax ‘hda’ but it’s pretty similar I think)
I can only think of very few situations in which GRUB would screw up.
One of which is if you have a single physical drive from which you have deleted a logical partition. (i.e. one hard drive, 3 partitions within the hard drive, and you have deleted the first or second partitions). In this case, the remaining partitions may be renumbered and hence, GRUB no longer has the correct location of your boot images.
Another situation is if you have some exotic arrangment between your MBR and GRUB wherein removal of an entire physical drive would cause renumbering of your partitions. I think I managed to do that to my own computer once, though I am not exactly sure how I managed that. I think somehow, partition hd1 was on the drive that I removed, yet, GRUB and the MBR were were on the remaining drive.
Regarding: Re-installing the Operating Systems on FPCB so as to dual boot Win98 and XP
The OP expressed concern about WinXP detecting the DELL soundcard. I’ve never used XP before, but I think you should be able to simple “disable” the soundcard under control panel->systems, which would then mean that the soundcard might as well not exists as far as XP is concerned.
The Dell box doesn’t boot.
You should be able to edit the GRUB config file to get it to work.
I think you can connect the old Dell HDD to the new box, boot Linux, and use that to access the contents on the drive. Linux should have no problems reading and writing FAT32 format.
:smack:
I knew I was missing something.
Good suggestions everyone, and thanks.
I’m going to mull over some things, but I’m scheduling ‘surgery’ for Sun afternoon.