Help please. Dip switches and mach 3 settings

[Radu_Andrei]

Hi John,
I.ve changed in Bios the boot drive to be the dvd drive, right before installing.
I.ll try tomorrow what you.ve just said in removing all things and testing.
I don.t know what an IDE drive is or how many ports I have.
Here.s a photo with the motherboard.

[cropwell]

That Mobo has 4 SATA and 1 IDE port. The IDE port will support two devices and I would recommend you use Cable Select on the IDE drives look at this ---- https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/bph03792 With Cable select the master is the first drive i.e. on the end cable connector and the slave is on the middle connector
SATA does not have that option and I see that the small drive cable tied to the box is SATA.

If you can set up XP on a separate drive, I would recommend it and don't mess about with dual booting. It looks as though you have a corrupt MBR (Master Boot Record).

The Mobo manual is here if you need it https://www.dropbox.com/s/vmr7ucg4kw..._1333.pdf?dl=0

[john swift]

this photo lead me to think your PC had IDE drives
connected by a 40 way ribbon cable



your later photo of the motherboard shows the newer (red) SATA cable connected to the solid state drive




as your mother board is the E3363_P5GC-MX_1333

it only has SATA ports



so you can ignore my comment about only having
a master & a slave device connected to a 40 way ribbon cable

just test the motherboard with no drives
then add one drive at a time to see if you have a faulty drive
stopping the board from booting

John

[cropwell]

as your mother board is the E3363_P5GC-MX_1333

it only has SATA ports

so you can ignore my comment about only having
a master & a slave device connected to a 40 way ribbon cable

Although the photo does not make it clear, that Motherboard has an Ultra DMA IDE port and from the BIOS start-up screen, it looks as though Andrei has an 80way cable with a HDD and a CD-Rom connected, both plugged up on the jumpers as Masters. As I said CS (cable select) is a safer way to go. If XP has been installed on the SSD, then I would unplug the IDE HDD and see if it boots up. Although you may have to alter boot priority in the BIOS settings.

[Radu_Andrei]

Hi.
Here.s another photo with the Mobo. Maybe it clarifies some things.

So I did remove the hard drive and it alllowed me to enter the Bios, so I deleted everything from the hard drive and started a new installation of windows xp sp3 x86.
It failed the first time, but went ok. ish the second time. After installing everything, I just got a black screen with Error loading operating system.
So I.ve burned anothed dvd with Recovery Essentials Windows XP and ran that, and applied an automated fix and I could start the PC.
I.ve got this two errors in the process and I have no ideea what they mean.


Regarding the IDe settings, here.s a photo with the Bios

I.m searching now for some drivers, as in XP device manager, under Other Devices, I don.t have any driver.
I.ve found a cd with xp drivers for win xp, but there are so many, so I need to figure out which ones are the right one. For example, in LAN drivers I.ve got Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, JMicron, Marvell, Realtek, VIA.
I did this things many years ago, so I guess they.ll come back to me.

At least, now I have available the Standard PC option in device manager, so I can change the energy management of this unit. We.ll see if it works when I.ll get there.

[john swift]

looking at your photo



you can see two RealTek IC's

I expect the larger one near to the heatsink will contain the LAN

the small one in the top left corner is the onboard sound chip

on the mother board
hidden under the heatsinks are the

Intel 945GC Northbridge
and Intel ICH7 Southbridge

John

[cropwell]

https://www.asus.com/uk/supportonly/...Desk_Download/

Try here

The LAN chip is above the battery and PCI ex1 socket. If you can read the make (I suspect it is Atheros) that will help you determine the LAN driver. Once you have the LAN drivers installed you can get onto t'Interweb and get other drivers installed.

In Device Manager/Hardware I usually check for yellow exclamation marks or question marks, but once I get to a state where everything seems to work, I lose interest in sorting out problems which do not affect me.