Hellllloooo! I've got a somewhat unique issue on my hands here. I have an old HP desktop (used to be my parents) that I'm tinkering with and there are some interesting things happening with it. I'm usually pretty good with troubleshooting (plenty of builds under the belt) but this one leaves me puzzled.
HP pavilion 5000-series desktop
533mHz Intel Celeron processor
256MB ram
Okay so here's the issue: My parents decided to destroy the old HD (10GB) for whatever reason, which had WIN98 installed on it. Besides being old and slow, it booted up okay and had no serious issues. I had a spare 20GB drive from a different older HP, which I am trying to install on this machine. All up until this point is fine, and it powers up okay, POSTs all drives spinning and ID'd in BIOS. The tricky part is when I try and boot from CD. I have various linux boot CDs and DOS boot CDs. Every time I try and boot from a CD (even windows install discs) it will give me "no operating system found". I tried win98, win2000, winXP and various linux distros all with the same result. The boot order in BIOS is CD>floppy>HD so to my knowledge this should be working. I've checked all the jumper settings on these drives and they're all set correctly--and the live CDs shouldn't even need a HD. My gut reaction is that the CD drive is not reading properly, and the HD has a bad install on it. I honestly don't know what is on the HD as far as an OS but I THINK it is win98. My only option is to boot from floppy now, and that requires me to dig up someone who has another old PC to make them in the first place.
I thought about installing this in my car as a "carputer" equipped with 7" in-dash screen (yet to be fabricated) with enough storage for all my music. If it doesn't work, I'll trash it and forget the idea since its no biggie, just a weekend project.
If the floppy doesn't work I have exhausted all the options that I can think of. What the heck is wrong with this??
HP pavilion 5000-series desktop
533mHz Intel Celeron processor
256MB ram
Okay so here's the issue: My parents decided to destroy the old HD (10GB) for whatever reason, which had WIN98 installed on it. Besides being old and slow, it booted up okay and had no serious issues. I had a spare 20GB drive from a different older HP, which I am trying to install on this machine. All up until this point is fine, and it powers up okay, POSTs all drives spinning and ID'd in BIOS. The tricky part is when I try and boot from CD. I have various linux boot CDs and DOS boot CDs. Every time I try and boot from a CD (even windows install discs) it will give me "no operating system found". I tried win98, win2000, winXP and various linux distros all with the same result. The boot order in BIOS is CD>floppy>HD so to my knowledge this should be working. I've checked all the jumper settings on these drives and they're all set correctly--and the live CDs shouldn't even need a HD. My gut reaction is that the CD drive is not reading properly, and the HD has a bad install on it. I honestly don't know what is on the HD as far as an OS but I THINK it is win98. My only option is to boot from floppy now, and that requires me to dig up someone who has another old PC to make them in the first place.
I thought about installing this in my car as a "carputer" equipped with 7" in-dash screen (yet to be fabricated) with enough storage for all my music. If it doesn't work, I'll trash it and forget the idea since its no biggie, just a weekend project.
If the floppy doesn't work I have exhausted all the options that I can think of. What the heck is wrong with this??
