rebooting xp help needed plz

[heath80]

Hello, I have an old packard bell 5106 system. I moved to Spain taking my motherboard, HD, RAM etc with me. The other day I purchased a new tower, CD roms and floppy. It seems my hardrive wont boot up proparly. I have had this problem before where it goese to the black xp loading screen and then stays on that forever. I fixed this problem a few times ( sticking it in the freezer, I know ://) This time it was slightly different though and it would boot up to windows, freeze up and then just restart and have the same problem again. Needless to say the freezer thing didnt work this time so I bought a second hand hardrive fro my local pc place the other day.

I am try to reboot the system with my original master CD´s ( the ones I burnt when first buying the packard bell)and with the red floppy. I have installed everything correctly and it seems to be working, the bios detects the hardrive etc. When turning the system on it will just bring up an error screen in black saying the hardrive is defunkt and ctrl alt del, it.
I have changed the boot sequencing to go from floppy first and even from floppy without IDE drive as second device. This prompt me for boot information to be put into the A drive. I put in my red disk the drive reads it and then nothing it just prompts me again.
Is it even possible to use my old master CD´s and red disk on a new HD? Its the same motherboard, cpu etc..?

Has anyone got any other bright ideas pleaseeee? Im getting desperate with it now. My local PC shop is useless. Welcome to Lanzarote haha



Any help would be great or if I havn´t made myself clear ask...

cheers Marc

 

[OnDborder]

Welcome to the Forum! http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=491697
Could be the harddrive or ram gone bad..
Maybe you could test the ram first with this http://www.memtest.org/#downiso .
First just run test "5" a few times. This tests the ram exclusively. Then let it run all the tests.
Do you know what brand the harddrive is?

 

[shadowdr]

You should also try the Ultimate boot cd. It can often repair hard drives that will no longer boot if there are sectors that need to be reallocated.
I would also suspect that the red floppy may have gone bad. Floppies will do this over time.
When you try to boot the cd, are you changing boot order to CDrom? The Master CD should not care what the hard drive is but it may have saved the info about the old one in the bios. If there is an option to reset ESCD in bios try that. If not enter bios and try to redetect the newer hard drive. Was the new hard drive formatted when you got it?

 

[Mizzery]

If the floppy has gone bad - you might want to see if you can use your restore cd's to make a new floppy boot disk if the cd's aren't bootable (many will have a utility on the cd somewhere to do this). Or borrow an xp install cd from someone and boot that for a manual install (my preferred choice as you ditch the manufactures programs). You'll just have to have another computer handy for finding the drivers.

Running some tests to make sure the hardware is in good order like the others suggested would be a good idea as well.

 

[curtis1552]

I had a similar problem, I think it was due to damage to the motherboard, and i could never get it to work; until I installed Linux. Onboard Sound/USB never worked and still doesn't, but Ubuntu boots up and I have PCI cards for USB and sound.