Frankenstein Upgrade issues

hi y'all - i've got a bit of a problem.


My roommate has asked me to upgrade her PC with minimal fuss and expense and i've been working on it. She doesn't want to upgrade the mobo or the processor, mainly cuz it's so expensive, but here's what i've got so far:


She's got an ASUS P2B board with a 300mhz processor.

I stuck a new 256 stick in it, and a new soundcard. That went fine - the problem i'm having is the new samsung 80gb harddrive i'm trying to put in.


It is not detecting it. Actually that's a lie - it detected it once, and i actually was able to get XP semi-installed on it, but on the reboot it choked.


Originally it got to the second splashscreen and would hang on HDD auto detection.

I was able to get it detected by manually selecting the harddrive, and selecting Normal mode. It hung on LBA mode and Large Mode.

Either way on the post-install bootup it choked again. if i try to set it as a slave to the old HD, the Bios recognizes neither.


My first instinct is to upgrade the bios. But i asked one person i trust, and he says besides flashing the bios, installign a new IDE controller would definitely solve the problem. i spoke to another person i trust and he mentioned soemthing about some utility that gets the bios to recognize the first 2 gig and then once you get to windows you see the rest of the drive.

The PC currently has a 4gig drive in there. does anyone have any suggestions?

are there 2 ide slots on the mobo or 1?
If 2, is the HD on the 1st or 2nd one?
Is the HD on its own IDE cable?
What are the jumper settings for the HD and anythign else hooked up with it (cdrom)?

Hey cross - thanks for responding.

I can't answer most of your questions yet, except to say that the HD is on an IDE cable with the floppy. I must confess i didn't really pay much attention to the slots on the mobo itself.


in any case, after doing soem reasearch, i'm gonna try doing a BIOS upgrade first, altho the bios revision that's suggested on ASUS site is a beta, they're products tend to generally be good.

according to the FAQs that's supposed to sort out the Large HD problem.

option 2 will be to run Samsung's Disk manager utility. if that doesn't work then it's back to the drawing board.

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the HD is on an IDE cable with the floppy.

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:confused:

Before you flash the BOIS you may want to conferm that your cables and jumpers are set properly

i will. i've been battling the flu for the last few days and i had cracked the case on her machine over the weekend as i was getting sick. i may have that totally wrong. hopefully if i'm feeling up to it this weekend i'll give it a go.


i coulda sworn that's what i saw tho.

on caveat i should mention - her dad put the pc together, and he has 0 training. the damn thing even has a coax adapter on it.

Don't throw any money at it ......

The easiest way to upgrade a PC is to increase the RAM.
BUT, an old Mo/Bo and a SLOW 300 MHz CPU ............ :sleep:

get them to start saving for a new one.

Just do the basics on this unit, clear the rubbish off, defrag, chkdsk etc.

You didn't give specs : So, at a guess Windows 98 / ME ?
you are talking of upgrading to XP .........
I'm not sure if XP will run at any speed worth a damn on such a low spec, if at all.

As for the HDD, why are you putting in an 80 GB unit ?
I am aware that it is cheaper to buy the bigger sizes nowadays [pro-rata]
but if the old HDD is working, why bother.

Save your time and effort, get them to save save save :)
it will be better in the long run.

my 0.02c
Pax

hey foxey! it's ME.


i got the bigger harddrive, because, well she asked me to. Hee. actually the old drive is 4 gig and she needs to keep records. I was going to just have her save it all to disk, but figured 6 of one half dozen of the other, in getting a burner.

she's also notorious for downloading every damn little thing, so let her have plenty of room to muck it up, and a few years down the line, her dad can fix it for her or build her a new one or soemthing.



As for WinXP - i've bumped the ram to 256, it's still a PII, 300 mhz, and that is just slightly above the minimum for XP, but the other option is 2000. her dad can send us the software for that too, but do you think performance-wise it will make that much of a difference?


btw - the coax card got me thinking - she's doing all this in preparation of making the grand transition from aol dial-up to cable modem. w00t. i should prolly swap that out too huh? i'm presuming considering the specs that all of this was put together prolly in 2000. What were network cards like back then? could i use the coax card? it's got what appears to be a regular network jack on it, as well as the coax plug.

Is there ANY money in the pot ?

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she's also notorious for downloading every damn little thing,

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using the two HDD's as below, will allow her to trash her data HDD, and possibly save the OS section.

New Mo/Bo - additional IDE slots to give one for the two HDD's, and use the other for the CD / DVD ? - use the 4GB HDD for the OS [C], use the 80GB for data [H ?]
New CPU - sub 2Gig chips are dirt cheap, and a 1.8 would see that puppy fly ...........[by comparison :D]

total outlay is only going to be around $100 ...............maybe a little more [plus your commission :)]

NIC cards are NIC cards ? if it ain't broke don't fix it............

256 MB of RAM is still on the low side for XP too, ideally get 512 MB.

W2K Pro ? will run on lower specs, but they're not THAT much lower. XP would be the better path, as that is in use out in the 'wild' more, and more apps / games are designed with Xp in mind.

a new motherboard and cpu for around a 100 bucks? seriously? everything i've priced comes in at 200~ish. and truth be told there's maybe 50 bucks left in the pot now. *lol* just enough for a nic card if i need to replace that, and maybe a mousepad.


i've been thinking about daisy-chaining the 2 hard drives, but here's a funky problem i ran into - when i tried to add a slave, no hard drive is found. doesn't matter if i use the 4 gig or the 80 gig as the master. this might be due to the bios issue tho.

FOrget the 80Gb hdd on the old mobo.. even flashing the BIOS may not even give you any luck.. a PII 333.. that old a mobo.. will be lucky to work with a 40Gb hdd..

for what you paid for the hdd you should be able to pick up a new mobo and about the same agail for a cpu.. oh..you will need a new PSU.. the old one will be out of the game..

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XP would be the better path, as that is in use out in the 'wild' more, and more apps / games are designed with Xp in mind.

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had a quiet chuckle.. no insult intended.. but Virus was missed from the list.. ;)

cheers

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but here's a funky problem i ran into - when i tried to add a slave, no hard drive is found. doesn't matter if i use the 4 gig or the 80 gig as the master. this might be due to the bios issue tho.

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Your BIOS can only see 4GB MAX, new BIOS or not.
Old systems / MoBo's CPU's etc are NOT supported, everything has to end, and in IT, the end is quicker than most :)

There is a VERY good chance that your 'Latest' BIOS is still pre-massive GB HDD's. [over 4GB]

My first serious system was a 486 DX2 66 MHz CPU with 300MB HDD and 16 MB of RAM, running Windows 3.11.
It was a work unit, the PPA to the MD had used it, so we're talking the dogs bollox of systems too :D

And that was in 1995 .............TEN YEARS

*lol* i still have a 486 sitting in my closet. all i ever used it for was surfing the net.


i'm embarassed to say i have no system of my own right now, but to be honest, after working all day on pcs and in pcs, i have no interest in my off hours.

in any case - i'm concerned that the bios update won't work. But according to Asus's site, the P2B hits the wall at above 120gb (that 137gb limit thing) after the bios flash. But the flash is supposed to allow it to see anything between 65 and 120gb.

Asus has always been trustworthy in my experience, so we'll see.

if worse comes to worse and i can't get it to work, then i'll just trade in the harddrive for a cd burner and tell her to put everything there.

besides, with the cable modem i can totally uninstall that godawful aol and free up some room on the original HD

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Originally posted here by foxyloxley

My first serious system was a 486 DX2 66 MHz CPU with 300MB HDD and 16 MB of RAM, running Windows 3.11.
It was a work unit, the PPA to the MD had used it, so we're talking the dogs bollox of systems too :D

And that was in 1995 .............TEN YEARS

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you know this actually reminded me, in about 1993-94 i remember speaking with a coworker - she had told me her husband built PCs in the basement, and that he was working on this superfast new computer with a 1 Gig hard drive. I remember saying "OMG - i want a computer with a 1 Gig drive" and she said to me "you would NEVER need that much space for a personal computer - that's for whole companies to use!"

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"OMG - i want a computer with a 1 Gig drive" and she said to me "you would NEVER need that much space for a personal computer - that's for whole companies to use!"

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Very true ..........
My first set of back ups for work data, was on A 3.5" floppy [one off] and it took almost TWO YEARS to fill it :D

After three years, we had managed to fill FOUR floppies ...............:cool:

*lol* how did data get so big? i'll blame it on bill.


in any case, i finally got this computer sorted. the bios update did the trick with getting the large hard drive recognized. then my next snag was getting an operating system on it. I did consider the master/slave idea, however, even after the update the system choked when i had both drives on the same cable. and of course the cds for xp and 2000 either didn't boot, didn't install or had invalid serial numbers, so finally 8 hours later, i wound up unplugging the cd player, and using the second primary for the big hard drive, digging up my ghost 5.1 floppy and cloning the current ME 4gig to the 80 gig. wish i'd thought of that sooner. it was much easier and worked like a charm.

and the machine is "flying" right now. I just can't wait to get rid of this stupid dialup.

thanks for your help foxey!