Cant get old computer to work!

DaveBennett · 8 Jul 2007 at 21:25

Hey,

My mum asked me to format her old Packard Bell iMedia 6185. I bunged my XP disk in the drive and booted it up, and it didnt auto boot from CD and I could not, and I mean I spent ages trying to, find a way to boot it from disk. I gave up, turned it off, and took the HD out and put it into my other computer and formated it and put XP on it. Loaded fine on the other PC.

Look the HD out and put it back in the other computer, in the mean time I had also updated the mobo bios on the packard bell. Booted it up, didnt get too the Windows XP loading bit. Got to the small white bar loading accross the bottom and when the white bar has loaded full it just sticks on there. Tryed safe mode etc but no luck.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Cheers,

Dave

Duke · 8 Jul 2007 at 21:34

XP won't boot with another systems' installation on there (because of the different hardware).

You need to go into the BIOS (usually F1, F2, F12 or DEL) and make sure in the boot order, the CDROM is before the HD.

phi1 · 8 Jul 2007 at 21:36

Like duke said!

eddie101 · 8 Jul 2007 at 21:44

how olds the packard bell? a lot of them have recovery partitions, the older ones had a small red floppy disk to intialise the recovery.

ah, jus read you formatted it already.... my bad

DaveBennett · 8 Jul 2007 at 21:53

Cheers,

I did look in the bios but could not find ANYTHING about the boot sequence.

We do have one of them red floopys somewhere, but god knows where!

Any other way around it?

Thanks!

eddie101 · 8 Jul 2007 at 21:54

When you go into the bios, there should be an option "advanced chipset configuration" or something along those lines. The boot order will be under there!

DaveBennett · 8 Jul 2007 at 22:06

Ill have a quick look!

Ta

DaveBennett · 8 Jul 2007 at 22:08

Brilliant!

Found it!

Cheers guys!

Havnt been on here for ages. Going to stick around, forgot what a great forum it is

!

Ty

Dave

eddie101 · 8 Jul 2007 at 22:21

wOOp

fobose · 8 Jul 2007 at 22:34

Duke said:
XP won't boot with another systems' installation on there (because of the different hardware).

You need to go into the BIOS (usually F1, F2, F12 or DEL) and make sure in the boot order, the CDROM is before the HD.

Oh it wont will it? Lies.

My bros laptop was over heating and would just turn off during XP instalation, so I had to take his HDD out, put it in my laptop, install winXP, bung it back in his laptop and it worked fine. And the laptops are completly different and have a 2 year age gap

mattyrigby00 · 8 Jul 2007 at 22:36

on microsoft site you can download floppy-images which are for pc's which cant boot from the cd, that might be worth looking at

Netvyper · 8 Jul 2007 at 22:57

Duke said:
XP won't boot with another systems' installation on there (because of the different hardware).

It will; sometimes, but its generally not reccomended. Often you get problems like the ones mentioned in the thread, and BSOD on boot etc.

However it does occasionally work. If you really need to do it for whatever reason, best thing to do:

Install WindowsXP as per normal, but at the first reboot, turn the machine off & move the hard disk then. Let it boot from HDD, and it'll go do all the stuff it needs to configure for the machine its in, but it'll be booting from hdd, and have CD-Rom Drivers etc available. Its a trick i've used far too many times in the past

greencreeper · 9 Jul 2007 at 00:07

Hmmm. Had similar experiences with my mum's old Packard Bell PC, and gave up in the end and used the noddy CDs that came with it. I think it did "funny things" with the standard OS install (this was Windows 95 or 98 - can't recall) - probably to make the hardware work. It was messy.

FatRakoon · 9 Jul 2007 at 02:21

Ok, in general, a HD with an Installation from one PC will probably fail if used on another.

This is entirely dependant on the Disk Controlers used

So, both of you are right, btu dont argue over somehtign like that.

Ok, Packard Bell PCs and NEC PCs are one in the same...

I will give you a little story FWIW and see if that helps...

Ok, NEC PC, P4 1.6 I think it was?

I did not have the original XP CD that came with it, and while I was able to get into the BIOS and force it to boot from CD First, it simply would not let me install XP reliably... I went through various ideas but the installation would fail at some point or another.

Now, this ( it seems ) was down to the Motherboard simply not liking the Stock XP CD and it wanted an NEC / Packard Bell one. I was unable to find one of these and so I went about the opposite direction.

Now, the BIOS Revision, was I think v1.0 on the board.
I found the Mobo was a Gigabyte somehtign or other and the BIOS was v1.6

But, no matter what I did, it would simply reject the BIOS flash???? - never did figure that one out, but...

I found a v1.4 out there too, and that did Flash just fine, and then I was able to re-flash with v1.6 over that!!!!

The end result is that the Mobo no longer thought it was a Packard Bell ( As I said, NEC and PB are the same - it was a NEC branded PC with an NEC XP Serial etc, but the BIOS showed the Board to be Packard Bell with thats stupid picture that come up on start up.

Anyway, cutting a long one short, I was then able to reinstall with a normal XP CD and it was fine after that.

So, I suppose the kind of moral of the story is to update your BIOS perhaps?

phi1 · 9 Jul 2007 at 07:59

FatRakoon said:
Ok, in general, a HD with an Installation from one PC will probably fail if used on another.

This is entirely dependant on the Disk Controlers used

So, both of you are right, btu dont argue over somehtign like that.

Ok, Packard Bell PCs and NEC PCs are one in the same...

I will give you a little story FWIW and see if that helps...

Ok, NEC PC, P4 1.6 I think it was?

I did not have the original XP CD that came with it, and while I was able to get into the BIOS and force it to boot from CD First, it simply would not let me install XP reliably... I went through various ideas but the installation would fail at some point or another.

Now, this ( it seems ) was down to the Motherboard simply not liking the Stock XP CD and it wanted an NEC / Packard Bell one. I was unable to find one of these and so I went about the opposite direction.

Now, the BIOS Revision, was I think v1.0 on the board.
I found the Mobo was a Gigabyte somehtign or other and the BIOS was v1.6

But, no matter what I did, it would simply reject the BIOS flash???? - never did figure that one out, but...

I found a v1.4 out there too, and that did Flash just fine, and then I was able to re-flash with v1.6 over that!!!!

The end result is that the Mobo no longer thought it was a Packard Bell ( As I said, NEC and PB are the same - it was a NEC branded PC with an NEC XP Serial etc, but the BIOS showed the Board to be Packard Bell with thats stupid picture that come up on start up.

Anyway, cutting a long one short, I was then able to reinstall with a normal XP CD and it was fine after that.

So, I suppose the kind of moral of the story is to update your BIOS perhaps?

That stupid image, Will be a boot logo, you can turn them off.

mattyrigby00 · 9 Jul 2007 at 08:58

not always, lots of company made pc's have "special bios'es" with almost no options, and that might be why you cant install with regular cds on them, i think its so 1) people out of warranty who have lost the disks have to pay them for a new disk, 2) when new os'es come out people have to get a whole new pc, the 1 "good" thing though is infinite hardware changes aslong as the bios stays the same without having to reactivate.

swanseajack · 9 Jul 2007 at 11:40

For older computers I just used a Win 98 boot disk, boot into dos, navigate to the i386 dir on the xp cd and type setup or win_nt, can't remember exact one to run but it would install from cd then like normal.

FatRakoon · 9 Jul 2007 at 12:40

phil14 said:
That stupid image, Will be a boot logo, you can turn them off.

Obviously its only an Image... I mentioned it to let you know that I had got hold of an NEC PC but it had a Packard Bell Logo.

Not all BIOSes will let you disable the Logo by the way... Many BIOSes are crippled like heck and have next to no options at all.

mattyrigby00 said:
not always, lots of company made pc's have "special bios'es" with almost no options, and that might be why you cant install with regular cds on them, i think its so 1) people out of warranty who have lost the disks have to pay them for a new disk, 2) when new os'es come out people have to get a whole new pc, the 1 "good" thing though is infinite hardware changes aslong as the bios stays the same without having to reactivate.

This is true.
Likewise for that old NEC P4 I mentioned... I had to flash with one BIOS then flash again with the latest BIOS just to get it to forget its an NEC and after that it installed perfectly and as far as I know... Its still running fine????

The original BIOS was the cause of it not being able to install XP although 2K and 9x installed fine.

swanseajack said:
For older computers I just used a Win 98 boot disk, boot into dos, navigate to the i386 dir on the xp cd and type setup or win_nt, can't remember exact one to run but it would install from cd then like normal.

Haha... No, I tried that way too!... Its WINNT you are thinking of.

I tried this from HD and CD but again, they also failed too.

Duke · 9 Jul 2007 at 13:40

fobose said:
Oh it wont will it? Lies.

My bros laptop was over heating and would just turn off during XP instalation, so I had to take his HDD out, put it in my laptop, install winXP, bung it back in his laptop and it worked fine. And the laptops are completly different and have a 2 year age gap

Ok as a rule of thumb they won't

But if it has similar chipset/motherboard it may well do.