hmm.... lets see..... buy a mac... haha...

OR pick up a cheap Sata external HDD case and then plug it in to the XP machine.

Josh

 

However, her computer does accept ata drives. If I take my xp ata hdd and put it in hers as the primary, would that work do you think?

 

go into the bios and set everything to factory defaults... Then try again. There's always the possibility something got turned on

 

Well I put my hdd in her comp and booted from it. I'm able to reformat her drive through my OS. So far so good. Thanks!

As far as macs go. Yeah, this isn't my computer, but my next laptop purchase will be a mac.

 

this will be a shameless plug, but I HATE it when people see situations like this and say "oh should have had a mac, buy a mac..." blahh blah blah. I'd be willing to bet that over 90 percent of windows/pc issues lie with the user, not the operating system. Whenever I see someone telling others that they hate windows because it has so many problems I literally see them as calling themselves retarted. Now, people usued to say that to people, but now the canned responce is "oh ****! buy a mac!"

that may seem all good and dandy to most, but i have run into far more f^$@ed up macs than I have pcs in my lifetime. I have taken 4 years of multimedia design courses working exclusively on macs and I cant even express to you how many times they completely locked up and crashed on me right when i was saving my movie project or as I was burning something to a disk. and also, when a mac crashes, there is aboslutly nothing you can do, it just completely locks up. with a pc, you can just kill the offending program/process.

back on topic, i dont think its your friends fault that this is happening to his pc, because he bought it off someone else, but that someone probably has to be the biggest tard on the face of the earth. sounds like he tried to reformat the harddrives before he sold the computer and instead of doing that he deleted the harddrives from the BIOS. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is hit F2 when you boot up the computer and see if you can reactivate the harddrives from there.

also, to clairify, the point of this rant isnt to glorify vista... I dont like it much either. I still run XP on my two computers as I know my way around better and I know how to manage/upkeep and cutomise it to keep it at top working order. it has never let me down. I just get frustrated when people give god status to their macs. its just a computer, and they really dont deserve such praise.

 

This is as far as I went with windows. Run it on my shitbox, and my ****-laptop.


But to actually make a semi productive comment here, if crap doesn't go right, and you can't fix it in your OS (like your drive problems), the bios is the first place you go.

 

2k is solid. I stuck with it for a long time. ME ftw though. jk... Yeah first thing i did was reset the bios. Thanks.

This computer worked fine according to her until 3 days ago when it started to not shut down properly, and now this. There were 4 user accounts and one of them showed a shortcut to a torrent utility on the desktop. Could be riddled with malware for all i know.

 

I maintain about 20 computers at my work and I also hated Vista. After about 8 months of working there I realize that the Vista computers run excellent and I only have problems with the XPs. Vista does take care of some of the security issues XP has. Vista is only going to get better as more updates and fixes come out. I remember everyone hated XP when it first came out and it got better. I still hate Microsoft...and Bill Gates....

 

I formated the hdd through windows and the comp still doesn't recognize a hard drive present when I go to install windows by booting from the cd. The bios sees it though. I downloaded a bootable hard drive utility to zero out othe drive. Is it possible my xp cd doesnt support a sata hard drive?

 

yea took me a long time to love vista, now i hate XP...

as for the problem with xp not installing... maybe theres something up with the bios to not allow the computer to get xp installed.. also check the manufactures website to see if that model has a bios update. just incase they supported going back to XP. other than that i would say, check the jumpers and make sure everything is plugged in good.. or if u have vista handy.. pop that in boot from it. format the hard drive with that, then restart put xp in and try to install it on the formatted/partitioned hard drive...

as for your mac crap.



i used to own a PowerBook G4 with Leopard... worst investment ever! thats all i can say.. but i do like the new MacBook Pro's i might have to get me one eventually and put windows on it.