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.

 

[Freestone]

When you press F1 and enter setup, is this any indication that BIOS is recognizing the new hard drive? Is the hard drive jumpered for Master? Are you using a newer 80-conductor IDE cable with the new drive?

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/images/80_40.jpg

 

[Beam0080]

now that you mention it i have the older type of ide cables in the aptiva is there anything else that can cause the windows discs not to boot up at the ibm screen? but i'm going to try one of the new cables and see if that helps, because i do get a small message that says "ide error

 

[Freestone]

Other than trying a new IDE cable, there are other things that can be wrong. For instance, is there more than one device on the IDE cable, e.g. hard drive plus CD-ROM drive? Is the cable full seated on all devices and the motherboard? Is the power cable fully-seated on all IDE devices? Did you verify the IDE jumpering on all devices attached to the IDE interface? The hard drive should be set for Master, the other device Slave, or both set for Cable Select, which MAY NOT work with the older style IDE cable.

Giving the make and model of the drive may help too.

 

[dualcore]

If you have the hard drive set at cable select, the drive needsto be set at the end of the cable. That is the MASTER connector. The center connector is the SLAVE connector.

 

[Beam0080]

i have tried many things but no luck yet i also tried moving the jumpers of both the cd rom drive and the hdd but no combination seems to work.

 

[vacunita]

How old is this PC?
Some old PC's had problems recognizing drives bigger than 10GB.

So maybe the motherboard just can't handle that big of a drive.

Do you have a smaller drive you can test with?

And Win95 has problems with drives over 2GB.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[wolluf]

vacunita - close!

c. 8GB is the bios limitation you mean - and that is pertinent here (bioses pre late 1997 may have this restriction).

Win95 OSR1 only supports fat16 - which has maximum size 2GB. But he was running 98 (upgraded from 95) - and the problem is pre-operating system.

If it is that old, I'd either buy a smaller drive on ebay or look to see if new drive has a limiting jumper (which will make it look like its 8GB to the bios).

 

[Freestone]

Maybe I am asking too many questions at once, so I'll ask only one.

What does setup say, if anything, about the new hard drive?

This was the first question I asked. It was asked because I suspect, as does vacunita and wolluf, that the system is too old to support bigger hard drives without software assistance.

 

[vacunita]

You are right wolluf it is 8GB sorry. couldn't put my finger on the exact ammount but new it was less than 10GB.

In any case Win95 won't see the full szie. Win98 will though, as long as the Bios can see it, which is what apparently Freestone is trying to find out since the first post.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Nelviticus]

It's been a while, but isn't booting from CD a fairly new thing? I'm sure I used to use an old IBM that couldn't boot from CD even though it had a CD drive. I remember having to create a boot floppy (or maybe using one that came with the Windows disks?) to get started with prepping the hard drive and installing the OS.

I also recall that even if the BIOS didn't recognise the full size of the hard drive it would still be able to use the 8GB that it could 'see'.

I could be getting this all mixed up though, it was a very long time ago!

Anyway, I would recommend this: on another PC visit

http://www.bootdisk.com/,

download an appropriate bootable floppy image (i.e. one with CD drivers) then create a disk from it. Boot the old PC with that, navigate to the CD-ROM drive from the DOS prompt (probably just type 'D:') then run SETUP.EXE from there. Hopefully the Windows installer will run and will be able to prepare the hard drive for you, although you may not be able to use the full 10GB.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[wolluf]

vacunita - win95 OSR2 will see larger drives - it supports fat32

nelviticus - you're right, some older machines can't boot from CD (and he said he couldn't find anything in the bios settings to set set to boot from CD). And having reread the post, it says he's trying to reinstall win95 with 2 CDs it came with originally. I'm wondering if this is right. If its a recovery Cd, win95 will fit on one CD, no problem. Also, recovery CDs used to come with accompanying floppy disks (that did the booting). So perhaps there's a missing floppy? Also, although win95 install CD is not bootable, XP's is - and he can't get that to boot.

And, machines old enough to not be able to boot from CD will also have at least the 8GB hard drive limitation (possibly 2GB limit) - so 30GB drive won't work either (or only way might be if it has an 8GB limiting jumper.

To get this working, needs a drive that can be recognised by the bios, and a method of booting to load an operating system. If 95 or 98 install CD is available, can do this by following Nelviticus's bootdisk link. If only recovery CD is available, think it needs accompanying boot floppy (booting from a win95 boot floppy, with CD support and recovery disk in the drive might allow the recovery option to be started manually from dos).

 

[Nelviticus]

The second CD is probably a 'system' disc with machine-specific drivers and extra software. Once the OS is installed you bung the second disc in and it should walk you through any additional tasks that need performing.

The FAT16 filing system only supports partitions up to 2GB in size, so if you're initially installing an early-ish version of Windows 95 then upgrading to Windows 98 afterwards you'll have to split the hard drive into several 2GB partitions. If you're just installing Windows 98, you shouldn't need to split the drive up.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[Beam0080]

you guys are right because after you go into the setup screen it lists all the drives that it has connected to it and it says

ide drive error

equipment configuration error

but the cd rom drive shows up but it never sees the 30gb hdd so i'm going to try and find a 2gb hdd and maybe that will solve some of my problems.

and to the person who asked how old the pc was. it originally came with win 95 on it new so it was probably put out around 96 0r 97 because i can't even find any images of it online.

 

[Nelviticus]

Before you buy a new drive (if you can even find one!) see whether you can find some technical info on your 10GB one. The BIOS might need you to tell it certain info about the drive, such as the number of platters and heads and so on. You don't need to know what this means, you just need to know what it is!

Modern BIOSes read all this info from the drive but in the olden days you had to type it all in from a specification sheet.

Nelviticus

 

[Freestone]

wolluf - Dare I mention Drive Overlay software?

 

[wolluf]

freestone - I was trying not to! But I suppose if this machine is just for kids learning, why not?

I've also mentioned the possibility of a limiting jumper on the 30GB drive (to bring it down to 8, which I'd hope this machine would recognise). I've got a stack of 2-4GB drives lying around out of old defunct machines - perhaps he has a friend with old unused machine he could extract such a drive from?

 

[Freestone]

Well I knew it was your all time favorite software wolluf, so I had to say something ;-)

The limiting jumper is a great idea. Now if Beam0080 would provide specs on the drive so we would all know what he is working with...

 

[Irish1957]

I have dealt with several of these machines, replaced ones from my work. Modern cables 80 conductor dont work on either primary or secondary ide. CD rom seems to only work on secondary ide with original cable which is 40 core with a single outlet not a standard dual outlet cable.

The only time I have ever replaced drives I have use 2GB. Have got 8GB to work as secondary

 

[Beam0080]

ok i'll try anything since it's not going to hurt if the thing completely blows up. so gimme all ya got and i'll try them and see what works.