Great value P4 mobo needed please!

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 :/
 
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?
 
Sounds excellent, just a couple of questions:

1) Can I download the ISO from anywhere? I've already had the PC for over a week so time really is of the essence at the moment!

2) Is there anyway to find out exactly which one I'd need?

Huge thanks!
 
Ah! Just found it, typed it into the Dell website and it came up with all sorts of relevant drivers, that's utterly fantastic, thank you!

Now all I need is to source a rebuild disk I guess! :)
 
Hmm, re-installed everything, but when I went to install the LAN device I noticed that it hung on the DOS window and didn't do anything, restarted, re-installed and it all seemed fine.

However, then the computer started taking between two minutes and forever to boot up properly (the three scrolling blue bars below the XP logo), programs were crashing, and it was completely freezing up for a few seconds every so often, all things that it wasn't doing before I format it!

I wasn't sure if it was related to one of the CD drives again because they were doing funny things, and sure enough on the final boot up it couldn't find the (rather temperamental) DVD drive and it seemed to run fine.

Is this purely coincidence do you think? Or is it the genuine cause and should I just completely disconnect the DVD drive? I know I should have checked it more but it's getting late now so thought I'd just check on here and get back to it tomorrow. Thanks!
 
Hmm, just when I thought I was getting somewhere, it's now coming up with an error saying something along the lines of "ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt" - absolute nightmare!

I've just been looking at a great page regarding the problem ( http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000646.htm ) and since it's happened so soon after a format I must say I'm a little worried that the HDD is corrupt. Saying that, I did mess around with Boot.ini to change the OS selection timeout change from 30 seconds to 3 seconds, so I'm going to rebuild that too :/
 
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