Old laptop advice

BrynTeg

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:( why lol

I have sitting in front of me an old acer aspire 1400lc, it has been bought a new ide 40gb hard drive to replace the dead ide hard drive so i can install fresh windows xp home onto it tonight:rolleyes:
Of course i took out the old hard drive, put in the new one no problems there, switched it on and booted from cd rom and went through windows but windows just says setup did not find any hard disks installed in your computer.? Surly the hard drive isnt dead.
 
in the laptops bios the hard drive is listed in the boot list, problem is i dont have any way of conecting the hard drive to any other computer to format it, the old laptop has no operating system on it at all, what a mess
 
have you got a vista cd or windows 7 get it to boot of cd get to format let it format then reboot it and use the windows xp cd.
mind you saying that the windows xp should detect the drive try a vista see if it sees it
 
nah, ive only got a windows xp cd. Very annoying. bios version is 1.10
 
stupid question time...when you fitted the drive did you set the jumper to the correct position for master or slave.
 
stupid question time...when you fitted the drive did you set the jumper to the correct position for master or slave.

its a laptop hard drive
 
im going to have a tinker in the bios and see if i can see if theres anything a miss, its allmost a relic this, do you think acer have a museam?
 
sorted, yes the new hard drive that they bought is a dud, i just tested an old back up ide that i had and it worked , thanks for the help and advice guys,

just one more quick question, the laptop has an intermittent power problem where it switches off, whether the battery is in, out or plugged to mains, if this was mine it would be sleeping with the fishes by now
 
just one more quick question, the laptop has an intermittent power problem where it switches off, whether the battery is in, out or plugged to mains, if this was mine it would be sleeping with the fishes by now

Have we got to guess what the question is?;)
 
the laptop is history, it blew up about 3/4 of the way into the install, i was chuffed:clap:
The lady across the road was gutted of course but im glad i'll never have to work on that rotten piece of plastic again.
 
the laptop is history, it blew up about 3/4 of the way into the install, i was chuffed:clap:
The lady across the road was gutted of course but im glad i'll never have to work on that rotten piece of plastic again.

I suspect a lot of us have been there: someone comes to you saying they've heard you "know" about computers and give you a dead box. You then spend hours fighting the urge to smash it up and haven't got the nerve to tell them it's either too old or it's got the wrong brand on the front!
 
I suspect a lot of us have been there: someone comes to you saying they've heard you "know" about computers and give you a dead box. You then spend hours fighting the urge to smash it up and haven't got the nerve to tell them it's either too old or it's got the wrong brand on the front!
been there done that got the t-shirt, family are worst, Sistyer says I'll pick you up and cook you a dinner on boxing day, get there and...can you look at this, I spend all day fixing there wireless network, no security on it..etc you get the picture.
 

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