Computer Resto

[Chris Solomon]

Hey Peeps... im new to this site and i thought u guys can give me an anwser on a problem.....i have and kinda old 2003-2004 computer Compact.. n e ways my brother kida thought he can do his own upgrades and stuff a while ago and now he has buggered it up:unch: .....Now when i got this computer off him it had no HDD and the DVD-rw was gone too. now i have put kinda random parts in to tthis monster i have a cheap CD rw now.... i have tryed all the hard drives i own .... like 4 of them and only one of them took to it a maxtor 8gb hd.... now it had windows 98 on it but i tryed to uprgaded it to xp home half way thought the inslation it asked to restart so i followed and when i rebooted i got an MTLDR error ... which i got with 3 outta the 5 HDs so i transfered the HD to my reuglar computer to finish the install... now when it was done i took it back to the computer and now its giving me an DISK BOOT ERROR .... and it wount reconize the HD no more and it wont reconzie the CD ROM n e more either ........... N E ideas would be greatly apperciated

 

[zephead]

hello and welcome to techspot.

you have to install windows using one machine and one hard drive. once windows has installed, you can't just swap the boot drives of two different systems.

i reccomend installing the maxtor drive, booting to the windows XP CD, and choosing to reformat the entire drive so you can go ahead with a fresh install. i reccomend using the NT file system (NTFS). if you only have an upgrade for windows XP, you can still get through installation as long as you insert your windows 98 CD when prompted.

how much ram does this compaq have? you need at least 256MB to run windows XP at an acceptable speed. you can get by on 128MB, but the computer will run very slow and prove to be difficult to use.

when i rebooted i got an MTLDR error

you mean NTLDR (NT loader), the essential component of all windows NT based operating systems.

and it wount reconize the HD no more and it wont reconzie the CD ROM n e more either ........... N E ideas would be greatly apperciated

do you mean to say that none of the drives are recognized by the computer's BIOS setup program, or the windows installer? if the devices fail to show up in the bios, there is a hardware problem. check for loose cables, and disabled controllers in the bios.