Hardware Not Detected?

[mjlarock41108]

My harddrive went up in my computer, that had xp. I took the harddrive out of my other computer that had windows 98 on it, the computer is not detecting my cd rom or ethernet onboard card. i waswondering how to put the drivers for them on the computer im trying to run windows xp disk on it.

[sp193]

You should run the Hardware Detection Wizard, and set it to detect non plug-and-play hardware. Install all new devices and reboot.

Windows 98 should at that point at least install the generic "PCI bus" device driver. If it does not then you may need to download the chipset driver installer from your hardware magnufacturer's web site.

You may need to reboot a few times to get Windows 98 to detect and install all PnP hardware later on.

BTW:

Well, you should wipe that harddisk clean of all data, and reinstall Windows on it. I'm not saying that you can't just do a HDD transplant, but this isn't really clean. There may be even complications later on.

But if this does not solve your problem, could you please post here your computer's full specifications?

[mjlarock41108]

The harddrive that was in it was a seagate 40 gig everytime i stareted up it said "disk read error" press crtl alt del to restart and thats why i switched hardrives. I even put the cdrom from the other computer figureing the driver would be there but not working i cant get it on the internet or run a cd so i dont know how to put the drivers on there. im trying to find a floppy disk becaused thats detected. it wont find the drivers but does detect it i beleive. i dont really know the specs but its a fairly newer computer i have been trying to boot from cd but no go. would a new hardrive do the trick or would the cdrom have the same problem?

[dencorso]

My harddrive went up in my computer, that had xp. I took the harddrive out of my other computer that had windows 98 on it, the computer is not detecting my cd rom or ethernet onboard card. i waswondering how to put the drivers for them on the computer im trying to run windows xp disk on it.

That shouldn't happen. Have you double-checked that all cables are well connected? Is the HDD SATA or PATA? And the CD-ROM? To me it seems you've got a bad southbridge, not a bad HDD. Or that something went really wrong during the HDD swap. Did you test the HDD you've removed in th other machine? Does it fail there too?

[sp193]

i dont really know the specs but its a fairly newer computer i have been trying to boot from cd but no go. would a new hardrive do the trick or would the cdrom have the same problem?

It's not a HDD problem if Win98 can already boot from it. It seems more like it's just a driver problem.

im trying to find a floppy disk becaused thats detected.

That's an alternative, but try to solve the driver issues in Windows 98 internally if possible as that's easier.

We really need you to let us know that following:

1. Your computer's specifications. Check your device manager to get a list of installed devices/find out what hardware is installed in your computer from your OEM's site.

2. The model and manufacturer's name of the devices in question.

Are all the other devices (Graphics card, sound card etc) installed and working properly? Are the correct(Not generic) drivers installed (e.g. Your graphics card should not be a "Standard PCI Graphics adapter (VGA)"?

Note that for Windows 98 to detect an optical drive, the bus that the drive is connected to has to have it's driver installed. If your drive is connected to a SATA or SCSI bus, you need to find and install the appropriate drivers.

If it's connected to a IDE bus than Windows 98 should have automatically installed the device.

If all your other devices (e.g sound card) are installed properly, but only your network adapter is not installed, then you may have:

a. a resource conflict

b. The adapter does not have it's driver properly installed.

Make sure that there are no device conflicts in your Device Manager (No yellow exclamation marks visible).

The harddrive that was in it was a seagate 40 gig everytime i stareted up it said "disk read error" press crtl alt del to restart and thats why i switched hardrives.

Did that error suddenly appeared? Windows XP was there right? The Operating System didn't even start right? Then it may be:

a. The HDD is not properly connected.

b. The HDD is dead.

Check if the old drive was properly recognized by the BIOS.

Offtopic:

I've got a question:

What are the signs of a Northbridge/Southbridge failure? This PC which I am using is starting to have:

1. PCI adaptor detection issues (As if all sockets have become loose). The devices would not be properly recognized in Windows/causes crashes)

2. the USB systems (Both onboard and the EHCI adaptor) seems to have trouble supplying sufficient power to some USB devices (Some of my USB HDDs seems to malfunction if I don't plug in the USB Y-connector or use a external power supply)

3. I get "USB Bus Resets" when I burn CDs/DVDs. (From a USB drive to a USB Optical Writer)

4. I will sometimes get "The device cannot be read" or something similar when doing large file transfers to/from a USB device.

5. The Mouse PS2 port has gone dead (No fuse for the Mouse PS2, but only for the Keyboard which works).

6. COM1 (Onboard) is more or less dead too. Devices plugged there sometimes malfunction. COM2 is a connected to a riser.

7. AGP graphics card plugged into AGP slot seems to have some detection issues (Or had caused some driver crashes in Windows XP/98SE before, but no more).

8. The RAM modules (Both Kingston ValuRam 2x256MB) seem to have detection issues (The BIOS beep code for a RAM problem, or sometimes not all RAM is visible to the BIOS) but "touching" the modules seems to solve the problem temporarily.

When I mean by it "seems like a socket is loose", I mean that by reinstalling that piece of hardware into it's socket, the problem is usually solved.

I thought that it was a bad PCI/DIMM slot (Both PCI and RAM sockets), but that that's impossible. Almost all the slots have that problem, even if they were unused by me before. The problems I've listed above are intermittent, and do not frequently occur. But when they do... my PC is almost totally disabled. It won't even boot up (Either it won't clear the POST screen, or Windows would crash).

The last one seems to be the biggest problem which is troubling me. The Mainboard is a Gigabyte GA-6OXM7E. It does seems to be on it's last legs.

Examples of not all RAM being detected (Total RAM shown by BIOS should be 524288K):

133660K (Or somewhere around there)

262144K (But removing either RAM modules would cause the PC to give a "RAM error" beep code)

4096K (This was the worst)

Edited January 2, 2010 by sp193

[dencorso]

The FSB, RAM and AGP slots are under the control of the northbridge, all else is controlled bu the southbridge. I've once had to fix a machine which had a quite localized southbridge failure: the FDD stopped working, but all else was OK. Since it had an EISA slot, all I did was give it an old ISA floppy controller, and it still worked OK for about four years, before being retired (while still functional) by a motherboard upgrade. In your case, it's difficult to say which part of the chipset is intermittently failing, because you have issues in the domains of both bridges, but they are interconnected, so it may be any of them or (much less likely) even both. What you're describing are the first signs of an impending "catastrophic machine failure", where the failure of a part overtaxes the next leading to its failure and so on, until you get a full-system failure. It's due to material fatigue, of course, and is unavoidable for real materials. Your best bet would be to replace your board before it atually stops working. You have a good chance, in places like eBay, of acquiriing another used motherboard of the exact same model for a good price, and chances are it'll be able to run longer than the one you're using now. Or upgrade to a slightly newer board at the right price. Good luck!