Bin or not to bin!

I got my old pc out and thought i would see if i could get it working !

Well its a pentium 3 550mhz.
It came with Windows 98 but I installed Windows XP a long time ago.

Plugged it in and the normal boot up screens came up, and it kept cycling round and not getting anywhere with press f1 to continue etc

So I changed the 1st boot up, to the disc drive and put my Windows XP disc in and it came up with searching for boot from CD rom and then it just cylces round to the opening screen again ? (boot up disc not found )

So i got my copy of Windows 98 and put that in the disc drive, again it went to searching for boot up disc but it came up with a new screen with the optoion to Boot from hard disc or boot from cd drive with a countdown in seconds to make your choice, but it would not let you input a number 2 (boot from cd drive) ? after the countdown went to 0 it just cycles around again ?

What choices do i have ? many thanks

1. Does it even have a boot from CD option in the BIOS?
2. The windows 98 CD was not bootable. You would need a boot floppy (I just downloaded a bootable CD to use with VMware). You can get a Windows 98 foppy from bootdisk.com

I know it's blasphemy around here to trash a rig but honestly... 550MHz? That's old school P3 and pretty pointless to have unless you want to use it as a server. I say either donate it, practice your modding on the case, put it on the curb or craigslist or have some fun demolishing it. Another possible use is to use it as a testing station for distributions before you throw any on your main rig.

550MHz is fine for the average user that just does internet browsing, assuming you can get enough RAM to put into it.

OVER CLOCK IT! hahaha, it would make a perfect linux firewall.......i have a 400mhz amd pc running as my firewall and it's perfectly suited for it.



Mike

I have a 550 (I think) running at 800 MHz. It defaulted to that clock for some reason. And that's without any OV. Maybe it's the unsupported PC133 RAM that I'm using in it.

I just wanted to have a play around with it ! I got a windows xp disc and i thought booting from the cd would at least get me to the cd key code page but it will not even get that far ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by grahamdvddvddvd

I just wanted to have a play around with it ! I got a windows xp disc and i thought booting from the cd would at least get me to the cd key code page but it will not even get that far ?

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Not if that computer's bios won't support booting from CDs. Microsoft has a downloadable thing that lets you make floppies to boot off of to start installing xp.

I did install windows xp ages ago and it worked, but then it all started having problems,booting up! so bought a new pc and put it in the attic, and thought id have a mess about with it, just wanted to get it halfway there before getting a key for it ?

did you upgrade to xp from within windows, or did you boot off of the CD?

Hi It was running on Windows 98 and i rebooted with Windows Xp disc and it all worked fine, with Windows XP running . It was in my sons bedroom and he used it for a while and then it all started going wrong ! So we give up on it, not sure if it was some thing he did or the actual pc.?

Boot from CD might be turned off in the BIOS. It could have viruses on it causing xp to act how it is.

i just downloaded the free iso onto disc of ubuntu, and the same happens ? It says checking for boot from disc then just cycles round etc

It might be a problem with the CD drive, then. You might also want to check the fans to see that they are all spinning.

Hi i changed the dvd drive to a known working one, checked all connections and tried again, the part when it says looking for boot up, from cd...not found, then it says looking for boot up from IDA 0..found. then it turns of and cycles through the same again ?

It worked! i reburnt the ubuntu disc and rebooted and it worked !!!! thanks for your helpxxx

np. I'm glad I could help. Sometimes old CD ROM drives can start to have trouble reading CD-Rs or just not want to read them at all.

**DISCLAIMER**
TBCS can not condone such activity

That being said, I only have one word for you. Thermite.

lol :D

OR take it to the shooting range..... always fun! Get some H.E. rounds...haha

I recently found a hard drive with Windows 95 on it.

It wouldn't boot in any PC as it had too many corrupt files.

I tried to attach it as a slave but Vista couldn't read the drive at all as it wasn't NTSC formatted.

Luckally I had just installed Windows 2000 on a crappy PC and I put it as a slave on that and was able to retrieve a whole heap of historic documents from the drive.

In short... the pc might not be great but it'd be good for testing old crappy equipment without pulling apart your nicer stuff.

vista can read fat drives, i know it can because my old system i installed vista on was 98 dual boot and it could read the 98 partition fine

and memory cards are formatted as FAT.

Hmm well for some reason it wouldn't even look at this drive and said that it wasn't formatted. It might have been more to do with the corruption on it then?

Because when I looked at it with Windows 2000 it would see the drive straight away every time, every so often when I was browsing the directories it would lock up saying that it could not read various sectors but I was able to use it long enough to get all the files in the my documents folder out of it.

Maybe it's got something to do with how they read the FAT as it is corrupted and locks up every time a repair is attempted

FAT = File alloation Table,

fat using a form of a table to find data, if it can't find the data that is supposed to be there according to the table it will lock up,

Fat uses 12k for a 0k file,
Fat 16 uses 8k for a 0k file
Fat 32 uses 4k but adds support for bad sectors and drives larger than 80gb (I once formatted a 500GB drive into FAT32, and it saw all of it, fdisk said it was 12gb, format /u c: said it was 56gb, dos said it was 56gb, but windows 98SE said it was 450ish +/- for FAT table)

Supposidy FAT 32 supports 2Tb drives using 2k clusters but you have to force this option doing an /U format setting the cluster size, wouldn't want to format a 2TB drive in dos, would take all day