there should be an option to automatically scan the drives...otherwise you need to open the machine and check the jumper settings on the drives physically

Both the HDD and CDROM are both set to cable select.

And I could not find no option in the BIOS to check drives.

Know what.

Ok so know I cant even get the thing to go to the dell screen. I think I may quit and tell hubby to take his piece into a repair shop, this PC has been nothing but trouble since we got it. Its on its second CDRW, and its second motherboard and its second chip, ugh. Its been reformatted like 8 times, and I have simply had enough, we also had 2 IBMS and we have not had a stitch of trouble.

But if any one can think of anything, please let me know. My suggestion is the garbage and my hubby wont agree.

I do have a question though, if since the HDD works in the 98 can I use it in the 98 and which parts would I have to change. Or would I be better of buying a new HDD they are not to expensive here. Any suggestions would great.

Ok before we go to extremes I just want to recap here to make sure I'm on the same page as you.

Correct me whenever appropriate.

The IBM can boot from CD with either hard drive and the Dell can't boot from CD with either hard drive.



As far as jumper settings go, I've run into trouble with having my drives set to cable select. I'm going to recommend setting the CDROM to master and the hard drive to slave specifically. If that does nothing for you then reverse them. Some hard drives don't really like to be set as slave so you may want to try setting the hard drive to master first. Also most drives can be forced to slave simply by removing all the jumpers.

Do you have a copy of windows 98? if so try booting from that CD. If not....

Do you have a floppy drive? If so then try to get a windows 98 boot disk and you could then boot to dos "WITH CD ROM SUPPORT" and then try to run the XP installer manually using the following command:

d:\i386\winnt.exe

I'm assuming that your CDROM will be assigned the letter D in this case. There is a good chance that it will be E or F depending on how many drives are in the machine.

And no 98 boots in both and Xp only boots in the IBM. This is why I am flustered.

But I put the XP back into the IBM and I think i found the problem, I have a DLL errorr (so windows is corrupted)when I try open certain things(like IE), and I looked online for stuff to fix it and nothing got rid of it. Any ideas. Oh yeah this is the error SHLWAPI.dll. And when I tried to repair windows with the disc it told me it could not find COM and gave me this error and the one from the blue death screen.

So i think my only option may be to do a clean reinstall unless anyone has an idea. ( After I save hubbies files ofcourse)

Let me know what you think.

Ok you put the hard drive with windows XP in the IBM and it booted? That's strange due to the fact that XP tends to not like being simply put into a different machine. But if it works it works right?

Try inserting the XP cd on the working computer and opening the Run command in the start menu and type

sfc /scannow

That might replace the offending DLL file and maybe help a bit.