I am almost ready to take my computer and put it out of my misery! Here are some of the specs on it: AMD K6-2 45o processor, Gigabyte MB, 128 RAM, a 20 and a 4 gig HDD, Creative Labs DVD-ROM, and Smart and Friendly CD-RW. OS is Win98 SE. For Christmas I got an HP digital camera, which connects via a serial cable connection. I went to install it and it didn't work. HP said that I needed to disable the modem in that profile, reboot, and then the camera would be recognized. No problem; this worked the first time. However, the second time I tried doing this, not only did the camera cease functioning, but my internal modem ALSO quit! I decided to reinstall Win98. This did not work. I then decided to format the HDD and reinstall. This worked for a little bit. I formatted everything, pulled all of my cards and peripherials and installed them one at a time. The modem was one of the last. When I got to the modem, things went screwy again. So, I pulled the modem, formatted the HDDs again, and went about installing it all again. I got a new USB modem (serial ports are evil, I have decided), and that worked fine. However, my DVD-ROM was not working - I am not able to view DVDs on it. I can't get the drivers installed for the card to work. Now my second HDD and DVD-ROM (which are set up as master and slave on the same IDE connection) have disappeared. This has happened intermittently during the whole fiasco, but was working fine until just recently. I have reset my BIOS and SETUP (within BIOS) to their defaults a number of times. When I go to boot up, the computer is EXTREMELY slow. The BIOS boot up works just fine, but after reading the various drives, it just hangs and sits there for, literally, a few minutes, in the DOS boot-up screen, after reading the drives and doing the memory test. What could be the problem here? I have tried reformatting, reinstalling, reconfiguring, etc? When I was plugging in the various things, the computer was always shut down. Any thoughts, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
jps33

While it is probably not part of the big problems, it is usually recommended not to mix a CD and hard drive on the same cable. Try putting the CD and CD-RW on the secondary controller cable.

"When I was plugging in the various things, the computer was always
shut down."

Do you mean plugging in USB devices? Plugging in anything else must be done with the power off.

Hang in there, more help may be on the way.



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reido@my-deja.com

Friends don't let friends load Windows ME

Sorry, I think I misread what I quoted you on. When I have my USB camera plugged in, it is not recognized about half the time while booting up. If I "hot connect" it (computer running), then Windows sees it. I got tired of trying to figure out why it worked that way, so I just ran a short USB extension cable out front so I could easily plug the camera in when needed.

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reido@my-deja.com

Friends don't let friends load Windows ME

jps33 - you say "I can't get the drivers installed ", why? What errors did you get? Anything usefull? The more error messages / diags the better.

Mox.

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ob .sig

There are two components to the DVD-ROM - the decoder card that plugs into the PCI slot and the drive itself. The drive itself is functioning fine, just as a CD-ROM, but to play DVDs, I need to install the appropriate software. However, when I go to do this, the installer for the software says that it cannot proceed because the card is not installed or not configured properly.
Last night I tried to change the cable connections on my HDDs and CD drives, putting the HDDs on one cable (the 20 GB as Master, the 4 as Slave) and the CD drives on another cable. In BIOS, the HDDs were not recognized in the auto-detect and the computer will not boot now. I've got the HDDs on IDE 1 and the CDs on IDE 2 (I think - I'm saying this from memory). Would the IDE port connection have anything to do with this? I've tried going back and resetting the BIOS and SETUP to their defaults and it still doesn't work.
With regard to the camera, it is a serial port connection, so I would imagine that I should power down before connecting it.
The other question is this - if the camera connection was not good and I then powered back up, is it possible that a static discharge could have occurred and zapped my notherboard?
jps33

I hesitate to say this because it wont be helpful, however assuming that ur pc was fine before u attempted install of this cam ??

Now if it was ok.. then immediately it would have figured that it was the cam and not ur pc.


I have used (and still do) usb cams, (intel, and logitech) on many diff pc's and not EVER had one problem. Usually if they for any reason dont work, u take them back (rather than reconfig ur entire pc) http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif


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"re-inventing the hammer.. why I oughtta..."

Well, the camera IS the obvious problem - the computer was functioning fine before that. The problem now is that the computer can't be restored to how it was before the camera. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

apologies for my lack of sensitivity......... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif

Do u have a system restore disk (cd) for this pc?? or r we way past that point ?

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"re-inventing the hammer.. why I oughtta..."



[This message has been edited by sea69 (edited 01-13-2001).]

Let's back up for a bit...

You said you tried to put the hard drives on the same IDE channel. Did you reset the drives' jumpers accordingly? Each has jumpers on the back, or on the bottom, that have to be set to tell the controller which is Master and which is Slave. Check that first. The jumper settings should be printed on back of the drives, if not, The Tech Page (http://www.thetechpage.com/cgi-bin/default.cgi) should be a good place to look.

Then make sure the ribbon cable to the hard drives is oriented correctly. It should have a colored stripe down one side of the cable, usually red or blue. That stripe corresponds to pin #1 on both controller and drives. To avoid confusion, standard configuration is to place the Master at the end of the cable, and Slave on the middle connector. These are also the two connectors that are closer together, the further one goes to the motherboard.

Once all this is correct, you should be able to boot and get BIOS to recognize the drives, once you get that far, let us know, and REMOVE the camera for now, forget about it until we can get the system to work. One thing at a time...

If you have already gotten the system to boot again, never mind this post, I can't tell from the above info if you have gotten it to boot and detect the drives yet or not, so I'm assuming we have to get past that point first.

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If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

I finally got things back up an running.

What it looks like is that the power connector I was using to plug in one of my hard drives, and also probably used to connect other devices, was bad. After closer inspection I noticed that one of the wires was not seated correctly. However, even when I changed the power plug I was using, the system would not boot with both hard drives connected (the master and slave jumpers were set correctly). I was able to get everything from the small, older hard drive onto my newer one. Then I removed it. Now the system is functioning fine. I am assuming that the smaller HDD has gone bad and is no longer useful - is this correct to assume? I just don't want to hook it back up and be back at square one.

With regards to the camera, it has a serial connection - are there any serial to USB converter cables that I could use to avoid future problems? I asked at a computer store and they said they had never seen one.

Thanks for the tips and helps everyone!

jps33

yes there are converters.. however I have heard of many problems w. these as well. Your BEST bet is to get a usb Camera. These converter cable's cost more than a decent usb cam. (intel or logitech)and both come w/ very nice software http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

**Staples said $135 for a serial to usb cable** Complete Intel Pro Cam Package(usb), can be had for less..

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"re-inventing the hammer.. why I oughtta..."



[This message has been edited by sea69 (edited 01-16-2001).]

Thanks for the tip - I'll look into it.

jps33