Yep, all good suggestions for dealing with a molten down Windows drive.

However, don't forget Voyager reported the machine wouldn't boot off an install CD, which would be a show stopper even if the HDD was brand new.

One diagnostic test for this would be to boot off a 9x EBD using the CD support option, and then see if you can access the CD drive at all.

Alinator

However, don't forget Voyager reported the machine wouldn't boot off an install CD, which would be a show stopper even if the HDD was brand new.

One diagnostic test for this would be to boot off a 9x EBD using the CD support option, and then see if you can access the CD drive at all.

The diagnostic tools are bootable (PC-DOS or something like that) and they don't try to get access to the hd on boottime like a windos installation cd, so booting from cd is no problem - except the controller is damaged, then the only way is to boot from floppy, run the tool and get the controller error message :-(.

__W__

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My point was that the way I read his post was the machine wouldn't even try (or failed) to boot off the CD drive (ie. it is junk).

In which case it doesn't make a bit of difference what is on the CD or the HDD.

If the IDE controller was bad, that should show up in POST (or in the BIOS enumeration).

Alinator

That 's right but according to this

Got into bios thanks.Enabled post messages.Attempting to boot from cd..etc for diskette A and hardrive. Tryed unbuntu, nothing, perhaps bad cdrom...? hardrive should have nothing to do .with not booting unbuntu...

it's not clear - the floppyboot would bring light into the tunnel.

If the IDE controller was bad, that should show up in POST (or in the BIOS enumeration).

On my experience, only in 50% of the bad hds.

__W__

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Agreed. ;-)

Alinaotr

Haven't used a floppy for years. Don't have one installed on my machine. but I do have one in the junk pile.Not sure If my mb p5k even supports it. will look for a ide cdrom Tryed a usb cd but was not recognised.

Haven't used a floppy for years. Don't have one installed on my machine. but I do have one in the junk pile.Not sure If my mb p5k even supports it. will look for a ide cdrom Tryed a usb cd but was not recognised.

Hmmm...

Well now I'm a little confused. If the notebook is new enough to not have a floppy, then the BIOS and CD drive should support booting from it. If it won't then either the CD drive, the connector cable, or the motherboard IDE controller is bad.

One other thing to check is to make sure the secondary IDE channel is enabled on the Dell. Typically notebooks are set up so the HDD is on the primary channel and the CD/DVD and the expansion bay (if it has one) is on the secondary channel.

Also make sure the jumpers on the HDD are exactly like they were before you swapped it into desktop for troubleshooting. The users manual or Dell support site may help out with that if you don't remember.

Alinator

Sorry, don't know where the mixup came from.but it's a dell desktop.and is at different location ,so not sure about model number. When I can get to it I'll format the hd again and try to boot from the cd into xp

Ahhhh, OK. You said it was Centrino powered in your first post, which usually indicates a notebook.

In any event, the last suggestions I gave may help troubleshooting. It'll just be easier to do in a desktop form factor. ;-)

Alinator

I'm getting ready to buy a USB 5.25 floppy drive. Yep, they make 'em! :^)

Want to get all my old TRS-80 Coco stuff onto a single DVD. Played around with it all the other day and almost all of the disk's still are readable and have all their data, even though they have been collecting dust since the 80's! Probably all fit even onto CD with plenty of room to spare, but who has CDR's anymore? Needed to make a "virtual floppy CD" the other day and only had a bunch of DVD-R's, so used a 4.7GB disc for 1.44MB of data!

Also want to get one of those USB turntables. Those are really cool. I have a TON of vinyl. A lot of rare records that are just begging to be MP3's.

Want to get all my old TRS-80 Coco stuff onto a single DVD. Played around with it all the other day and almost all of the disk's still are readable and have all their data, even though they have been collecting dust since the 80's!

You had the $600 180K floppy drive! Luxury. My Coco was a 4k reg basic with the cassette player. Type CLoad (or CLoadM for the fancy stuff), and hold your breath as the cassette wheel began to spin forward onto the boot loader, when the block cursor would either begin to blink or just freeze. Basic & OS took about 2.2k, leaving you about 1.8k to party down with 2bit sound and 8 colors on the palette. Eventually I dug deep to upgrade to 16K extended, and then went to 32K with a somewhat "unsupported" home memory upgrade (it was fun poking that screwdriver though the Radio Shaft void sticker). And when I did finally get a floppy drive, I had to notch the flip side to save money... those floppies were $5 a pop and formatted with at least 40K in bad tracks even when unnotched. And ya know, using ROM packs to deliver software is completely under-rated.

Wonder how long a WU would take on a .89mhz 6809E ??

Want to get all my old TRS-80 Coco stuff onto a single DVD. Played around with it all the other day and almost all of the disk's still are readable and have all their data, even though they have been collecting dust since the 80's!

You had the $600 180K floppy drive! Luxury. My Coco was a 4k reg basic with the cassette player. Type CLoad (or CLoadM for the fancy stuff), and hold your breath as the cassette wheel began to spin forward onto the boot loader, when the block cursor would either begin to blink or just freeze. Basic & OS took about 2.2k, leaving you about 1.8k to party down with 2bit sound and 8 colors on the palette. Eventually I dug deep to upgrade to 16K extended, and then went to 32K with a somewhat "unsupported" home memory upgrade (it was fun poking that screwdriver though the Radio Shaft void sticker). And when I did finally get a floppy drive, I had to notch the flip side to save money... those floppies were $5 a pop and formatted with at least 40K in bad tracks even when unnotched. And ya know, using ROM packs to deliver software is completely under-rated.

Wonder how long a WU would take on a .89mhz 6809E ??

LOL. You had a Coco1. I was spoiled in comparison as my first was a 64K Coco2. I did start out with cassettes at first too. I think I was like 13 and wanted a Nintendo for Christmas. Instead, my parents got me that computer. I was mad at first! Oh yeah, you also can't forget those little black Radio Shack joysticks that we all had! The stick was about the size of a toothpick. After a while, you had to learn how to hold it "just right" because it got bent after you sat on it. LOL.

Yeah, I think 5.25 drives were about $280 when I got mine. That was for everything: the drive, the case, ROM pack controller, cables. They were even 40-track, DS/DD drives by then. You could POKE RSDOS to get all 40 tracks and both sides. Eventually someone wrote the "diode trick" article in the Rainbow on how to access both sides without POKE'ing RSDOS. Radio Shack has always sucked, but at least that was back when the sales guy at Radio Shack knew what a diode was. Today's Radio Shack, "You got questions? We have cables and batteries."

Later on, got a 128K Coco3. (Wow, 40 and 80 columns! LOL. Can't read those 80 columns on the B&W TV, time for a monitor now!) Ran a BBS for quite a while. In fact, I may be able to claim having the world's first and only "telnet'able" Coco BBS on the internet in 1988. I had a family member who let me use her University VAX/VMS account. Obviously, the Coco didn't have a TCP/IP stack, so my connection to the University was serial. The University also had a DECserver, with a number of "one-on-one" 8N1 "lines". If two people telnet'd to it at the same time, they were talking. I just kept my BBS "hanging" on one of those "lines", using REMOTE3.BIN.

Eventually got into OS9 with the Coco3. Got the 512K upgrade kit. Never got a HDD as they were still for the rich! 10MB was like $800! OS9 was cool though. It definitely influenced the direction I took after the Coco's: Amiga, OS/2, GNU/Linux, and now moving into FreeBSD.

You could always just POKE 65497,0 and crunch that WU twice as fast. LOL.

Oh you can't forgot typing in those programs from the Rainbow! Especially the ML programs that were written in BASIC. Those DATA lines went on FOREVA! I remember typing in one ML game that took up like 1/2 of a Rainbow issue. The damn thing didn't even work when I got done probably because I typed one number in like 10,000 numbers wrong. I was pissed!

Good times... Or were they? Yeah, they were. :-)

Hmm USB 5.25 eh.... Would love to archive my C64 stuff onto PC somehow. Yes I've got an emulator but it's my own stuff on the disks I would like to live for eternity.

Hmm USB 5.25 eh.... Would love to archive my C64 stuff onto PC somehow. Yes I've got an emulator but it's my own stuff on the disks I would like to live for eternity.

I had to toss all my C64/PET hardware and software last year when I got flooded out. This included the early TPUG (Toronto users group) news letters and the dozens of different magazine titles I'd subscribed to (many from first issue), that I had collected starting in the late 70's. It was a really painfully experience getting rid of my introduction to home computing.

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Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

Hmm USB 5.25 eh.... Would love to archive my C64 stuff onto PC somehow. Yes I've got an emulator but it's my own stuff on the disks I would like to live for eternity.

I had to toss all my C64/PET hardware and software last year when I got flooded out. This included the early TPUG (Toronto users group) news letters and the dozens of different magazine titles I'd subscribed to (many from first issue), that I had collected starting in the late 70's. It was a really painfully experience getting rid of my introduction to home computing.

I still have the first 2 years of Byte magazine sitting in storage. And they are stacked high on shelves, well above any water line...

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Mark

many of the laptop FDD have a usb port on the back.
Might look around for one of those.

I still have my trs-80 color II and it still works.
Had the cassette and a small thermal printer.
note to self.. dont leave printed programs in parents attic.
:(

-s

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