PC won't boot

[hack12]

Hi, I have a old PC that won't even startup. When I try to boot of a Windows XP CD it just gives me a black screen. When i try to boot from a bootable floppy I can get in (XP Boot Floppy) to the dos prompt however for some reason I can't access the C:

I had searched the forum and found that there was a similar issue people were having and they replaced the motherboard battery. I am going to try to do that however I was wondering that if the motherboard battery was bad than how come I can boot into dos from a floppy drive but it won't boot from the CD.

In addition its been a while since I did this so I can't remember any more but is it possible that when you boot from DOS you can access the Hard Disk. I just created a boot disk from another win xp machine I had. I made it a fat partition. This bad machine isn't mine so I don't know what OS was installed on it. So I just wanted to confirm that once i boot from a Fat32 formatted XP boot disk should I or shouldn't I be able to get to the Hard drive. Should I try formatting with NTFS and than maybe I can access the HDD just in case it is NTFS formatted? Any suggestions on all the various issues would be really great. Thanks

 

[Tom Mask]

Yes, I believe that it's possible to access the C: drive from the DOS. The problem is that you're trying to install XP on an old computer that doesn't have the hardware requirements for it. That's a big problem. Even if you replace the HDD, you'd have to replace the entire Mobo, as well as the cables, power supply might be able to stay. In short, you'd basically have to spend a small fortune to build another, newer computer in a crappy old case (not saying your computer is crap, :3; i just dislike the beige color of old cases).

Are you just doing this to help a friend out? or is this for your own experience?

My recomendation would be to format it to NTFS, but that's just me.