Dinosaur PC...HD troubles

[QuietOne]

Old 486 (don't cringe)...gave me no problems, but I haven't used it for over a year. Tried to boot up and got Invalid ISA Configuration Informaion error. Bought a new battery.

Now geting Maximum 120 HD controller ready
and things eventually time out. Still getting Invalid ISA message. Everything looks OK visually, but I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong.

It had Win95 on it and the startup disk is no good to me either.


Any suggestions (besides getting rid of the thing)?

[Ed_S]

Pull the I/O card & check the contacts for corrosion /oxidation, also blow the dust out of the slots.
Cheack all other contacts as well.

[welsh wizard]

also pull all the cable connectors 1 at a time and reset them as these could cause a dry joint on maybe one pin only, this might just be enough to stop transfer. ( noticed you said boot disk no good, does that mean you can't get to the DOS promt screen, if you can and you have a shareware proggy called config, run it and see what that reports back.)
WW

[QuietOne]

OK....so after a new battery and IDE cable, my hard drive is recognized BUT for some reason, I could do nothing unless the c: drive was reformatted. So now I have an empty hard drive. That's all great, but of course there is another problem. My CD rom was set up as a slave to the hard drive since my dinosaur motherboard has only 1 IDE connection. I can't for the LIFE of me get the CD rom recognized, so I can't get my OS (Win95) on the HD. I was able to find the driver for the CD rom and put that on the HD and all of the things on my system disk are on the HD also.

Where do I go from here?

[wyvrn]

You need to copy mscdex.exe(win95 system file hint hint) to your hard drive, and get the cdrom dos driver (cdrdos.exe) from memorex.com . Then do this: md c:\dos and put mscdex.exe into the dos directory. Make autoexec.bat and system.ini files (I think you can use notepad on another comp and just rename the extentions to bat and ini). Put autoexec.bat into c:\ and system.ini into c:\windows (make this dir too on your blank hd). Finally, intall (unzip) the memorex driver, and run the install program. Reboot your computer and you will have a cdrom driver loaded onto your machine.

An easier way is to go to bootdisk.com and download the win98 startup disk, it it has an option to load the cdrom driver for you.