A little help PLEASE! ! !

[Beam0080]

i have this old ibm aptiva that was running windows 95 upgraded to win98.

my problem is this the hdd went bad and i went out and bought a small 30gb to replace the one that broke. when i go to install win95 with the two cd-roms that the system came with it won't do anything all i get is the ibm startup screen and then it says to press F1 for setup menu but even if i go into it there is nothing there that helps. i even tried to use my windows xp professional edition but i still get the same ibm screen.

has anyone here encountered this problem and how did you fix it? i'm fixing this older machine so that i may teach my children how to use a computer without wrecking the good pc in the house.

 

[wolluf]

So - have you checked if the 30GB drive has a limiting jumper - drive manufacturer's site should tell you. If it has, set it and see if recognised in the bios. If you can't find info, post drive details here.

Similarly, the drive manufacturer should have overlay software on their website (which makes larger drives workable with older bioses). Would normally issue big warning with this - because it can cause all sorts of problems retrieving data if you ever have a problem/want to upgrade. But as this is a 'training' machine, shouldn't matter.

Also - have you friend with old unused machine - which might harbour a smaller (2-8GB) drive they don't want?

If you can get bios to recognise a hard drive, then with the win95 boot disk with Cd support from

http://www.bootdisk.com

you should be ready to go to install windows 95, which you can then upgrade to 98 if desired. You may need to find some drivers (graphics, sound etc) too - generally can be found on the internet.