Great value P4 mobo needed please!

Sounds like a good plan actually, thanks. Will give it another day or two and then will just put the old motherboard back in and give it her back, hopefully I can get a refund for the motherboard but if not I'll just stick it on eBay. Don't like the idea of losing 16 hours of my life plus £35! :(
 
What I'm currently thinking is I should just put the system back to how it was with the old board, give her the computer back and tell her to take it somewhere else because I can't fix it. I'll then either hopefully return the motherboard as being faulty, or if it comes back as being fine and I screwed up, just stick it onto ebay.

One question regarding the old board; when in windows it was hanging on regular occasions (it wasn't loading anything, you could move the mouse etc but 90% of programs just wouldn't respond) and also the CD/DVD drives were unavailable. Is there anyway of fixing this, or is the motherboard dead? Once again a huge thanks for all of your help!
 
xKratosx said:
One question regarding the old board; when in windows it was hanging on regular occasions (it wasn't loading anything, you could move the mouse etc but 90% of programs just wouldn't respond) and also the CD/DVD drives were unavailable. Is there anyway of fixing this, or is the motherboard dead? Once again a huge thanks for all of your help!
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Well, my first instinct would be to back it up, re-install from the recovery CD (now I know it's a Dell) and see if that fixes it. If not, then I'd probably recommend your friend to buy a cheap replacement machine - a P4 2.4GHz must be just about up for renewal now anyway, surely?
 
She's given me a brand new Windows XP SP2 CD anyway, that's what I wanted to do originally anyway was just format; but you can't even see the CD drives in DOS so can't re-install :(
 
Huge thanks once again for the reply dpp, unfortunately I've given up on that board and have resorted back to using the old one;

Probably worth noting that this is a completely seperate problem and in no way relates to what I've said above ^ :-)

The old board's in, and it boots up fine. In fact, it gets to the Windows login screen really quickly, you hit enter to login, and then it just hangs. It doesn't load, but it doesn't do anything until you press ctrl, alt and del, and then it loads up the desktop very quickly too.

No problems with that, until you try to access something (even My Computer for example) that tries to see the CD drive and then that window just completely stops responding, the computer carries on just fine though, so if you wanted to load up My Documents for example it does it without a problem, whilst My Computer is struggling along in the background.

I've tried running an IDE check in the BIOS too; it comes up saying it's found the hard drive which 'passes' the test, but it can't find anything else, just takes ages and then says "No IDE device found" for the other three slots/ports or whatever they're called.

Any suggestions would be very welcome, and I'm really sorry for keep dragging this thread back up, but I really, really want to get this sorted :(
 
Nope I'm afraid I don't, but seems I can't even get that far anyway. I've just swapped the IDE cables around (at the motherboard end) and it's now detecting the CD-RW drive; I assume that means the IDE slot on the motherboard is dead and thus the motherboard is now useless?
 
I've just tried connecting the HDD and CD drive using the same cable now, and it's still only detecting one drive. I'm completely at a loss with this :/
 
Scrap that, nothing is working at all now; I've just tried all sorts of IDE/jumper combinations and it isn't detecting either of the CD drives nor the HDD. Tried using the exact original set up for the hard drive too; coming up saying no boot device and it can't see the HDD at all. FFS!
 
WJA96 said:
I'm going to be vaguely insulting now and suggest that you may have not set the master/slave jumpers correctly?
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No problem at all, you can never be insluting/patronising when offering help and I really appreciate it :) Unfortunately the master/slave jumpers are indeed set correctly, I've tried all sorts of combinations, but none of them seem to be working at all now :/
 
The last thing I can suggest is that you change the IDE cable itself. It's possible the cable may be damaged, rather than the motherboard. I don't suppose the motherboard has any SATA connectors or that you have a PATA PCI card to try instead.

I use Dell systems all the time and the one thing I do know is that they are set in the BIOS to be rebuilt from a Dell recovery/installation disk rather than a Windows setup disk. :(
 
Already tried a few cables unfortunately, but cheers for the advice anyway. That PATA PCI sounds interesting? Is it basically just a PCI card that has IDE slots? I searched on Ebay quickly and couldn't find anything unfortunately :(

Is that definitely correct about the Dell machines? Does that mean I won't be able to use her XP SP2 CD anyway?

/may as well give up now :/
 
I'm not saying it's impossible to rebuild a Dell software install from a Windows CD, just that Dell make it very easy to rebuild it from a recovery CD or sometimes a recovery partition on the hard disk.

Have you tried Dell's support website? They are pretty good. You type your service tag number in and most of the Gotchas are presented, together with fixes. They also allow access to the recovery manuals etc.
 
Ah excellent, once again a huge thanks for the info! Not sure of the service tag at the moment though unfortunately since I'm at work; is that the serial number that's on the motherboard or...?

Just hope to god I can at least get it to detect the hard drive, at least then I can maybe as a last resort go into windows drive manager, remove the CD drives and then use an external/USB drive.
 
Please disregard anything I've said in this thread - this is now a slightly different issue to what I was having before, and definitely a different issue to the computer now powering up.

Basically, I'm using the old motherboard at the moment it runs very quick until it either logs in or does something that requires a CD drive. I went into My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management which hung and took ages to load; but when it did, the computer realised there wasn't a CD drive present and everything was running incredibly quickly. I logged off and on again, the desktop came up within a few seconds; great! Now all I need is an external CD-RW and I'm away, right?

Wrong! Rebooted the system and had the same problem, it's still looking for the bloody CD drives! Question is, how do I stop Windows from searching for them and remove them for good? If I can do this I'm just going to get an external drive and I'm sure everything will then run very smoothly, I just need to stop Windows from searching for the drives that atm just aren't there. Any advice would be fantastic, thank you!
 
I've made a little progress; it can see both of the CD drives now at least! \o/

Still having problems with it randomly hanging in Windows, maybe random isn't the right word, but upon logging on and logging off it takes absolutely ages and just sits there idly without loading anything, likewise when I try to open My Computer or similar. It still speeds up considerably (in fact, it speeds up to 'normal' speeds) as soon as I run Disk Management and it realises what drives are there, which is really odd.

Any suggestions before I try a format please? I know it may be the only option, but I'd be installing an XP SP2 and apparently Dell machines don't like that at all; not to mention I don't have the original drivers!
 
Have tried removing and re-adding the drives using Disc Manager, have tried doing a Windows repair but can't because it has XP Pro installed but the CD I have is XP home and am currently running AVG but it hasn't found anything as yet.

I think a lot of these problems came about when she tried installing her new broadband/wireless router, I've just noticed the firewall is disabled and when trying to re-enable it I'm presented with this error - http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/8067/925071245dt.jpg - could it be related?
 
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