Hi there,
I am currently trying to fix a machine that has been broken for a long time. What happens is when the machine is switched on it makes it as far as the Windows XP Professional loading screen and then gets stuck there and does no progress any further.
I put the Windows XP CD in it and tried to boot it from CD. I thought if I could get to the windows recovery console I would be able to do chkdsk to try fix it however before I could even get that far I got a message saying that it couldnt find any hard disk drives and needed to exit.
I then had a look in the bios and saw that Primarey IDE drive was listed as “not installed”, the primary IDE slave listed the Sony DVD drive, secondary IDE drive “not installed” and secondary IDE slave also “not installed”.
On closer inspection inside the case there are two Maxtor DiamondMAX Plus 9 160Gb harddrives. Also inside the case is a 3 1/2″ floppy drive someone has connected up. inside the floppy drive there was a disk which I have been told has the RAID drivers for these hard drives on but the metal bit on the disk seems to have been bent a bit and the window mechanism on the floppy itself is now jammed open.
So any idea how I can make a start at getting these hard drives set up and configured? I was thinking I might need to use a working PC to download some type of setup file and burn it on a CD and pop it in the broken machine?
Any help, advice very very much appreciated. If any further information is needed just ask.
Thanks
Rosie Hamilton