midi3d

Once again, thank you all for your advice! I've got XP installed and updated, drivers installed, and all of the files back on the computer. I downloaded the drivers from the eMachines web site. All but the ethernet driver, that is. For some reason, eMachines has chosen to not provide it over the web. Perhaps they assume that if you're connected to the internet, you already have it installed. Or perhaps there are different ethernet cards installed on different motherboards. <soapbox> Both of these are conjecture, but I can't say either are satisfactory. If a company is going to provide support to their customers, they should provide all the resources that make that support complete. Inadequate/generic documentation and missing drivers are not acceptable. </soapbox> So, I looked for the motherboard model number and went to the intel download site to get the ethernet driver for their d845gvsr board. That happened to be the board model in my friend's T3828, but they could be using other boards for different batches, right? I looked at the capacitors, and none of them seemed to be leaking or expanded. I downloaded HWMonitor from www.cpuid.com. All the voltages and temperatures seem to be in normal range (CPU @ 35 deg C, HD @ 38 deg C) except for the +12V post, which fluctuates from 11.68V-11.80V. Is this an acceptable way to see if the power supply is doing its job? And, is this an acceptable range for the +12V post? Drew

Thanks so much for all your advice! I ran MHDD, which gave no errors. It seems like a very useful piece of software, but I need to ++ my HD knowlege to be able to use all its features. I also put in my own extra WD I got a retail copy of XP pro from a friend, which, by golly, is installing like clockwork. .........Spoke to soon. Crash/reboot just occurred while copying install files. No error message. This is getting uglier and uglier. .........Second try is going better. I'll update you on the progress. It seems, though, that there _is_ some hardware problem which will need to be dealt with. @puntoMX: I just saw your post, so I'll look at the capcitors. Thanks for not telling me to google it. I owe you one. Drew

Memtest gave no errors after 77 passes. How can I check the capacitors around the CPU? I have a multi-meter.

I'm fixing my friend's eMachines T3828 (Celeron D, 256MB, Western Digital 80GB HD, Generic Combo drive). I've gotten the important files off the HD, using the Win98 install disk to boot and moved them to a pen drive. However, I can't get the Win98 install to run. Install starts, but when I get to partitioning, the intaller keeps asking me to insert the install disk into drive D:. I've tried 1-swapping the CD drive for my own 2-copying the install files to a pen drive, booting with the CD, and running the install from the pen drive 3-playing around with different IDE cable configurations I've also tried installing several flavors of Ubuntu. They all give a write error when trying to copy files for setup. Does anyone know if there could be special hardware on eMachines that would prevent anything but the original recovery disks (lost) from installing an operating system? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.