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On 23/04/13 15:21, bad apple wrote:
I have not worked that out yet. I am not too sure how to find out. I have left the sides of the tower off so I can look inside if that helps.That's not that old actually, some of us here on this list have got proper antiques in our garages! A 2006 vintage machine will quite possibly have both SATA and IDE ports on the mainboard and will in all likelihood boot from USB as well. Can we just clarify then, is the replacement DVD drive you have a SATA or an IDE unit? Does your motherboard have SATA, IDE or both types of connectors?
Yes, I have already checked the BIOS when I found that it would not boot from the DVD drive. The list of choices are HD, DVD drive and floppy drive. That last is interesting as there is no floppy drive in the machine. DVD is top of the choices at the moment.I would have thought it would probably have both as it's from the time when machines were still transitioning from one standard to the next - you'll probably have SATA ports on the board and a legacy IDE connection as well. You might well only need to grub up an old IDE ribbon cable from somewhere to get it connected. Sidestepping that for a moment, do you know how to get into the BIOS on that old PC? It's usually achieved by hitting F2 in the moments after initial boot (I tend to just hammer it repeatedly to make sure I don't miss the window of opportunity). Manufacturers do have an annoying habit of changing hotkeys around though - DEL and ESC are both common alternatives. Either way, your PC probably displays a very brief BIOS flash screen which with any luck will include the relevant hotkey information so look out for that.
The BIOS booting list has no mention of USB.
There are several other options for a machine without a working optical drive as well, but I think I've got a pretty good feel for your technical level by now and I suspect they might give you a bit of a headache. Nonetheless, if you have a spare HD around you can effectively dump an installer on to it in your main working PC, transfer it to your old PC, and use it to boot and install to your main drive.
I should have said, the old machine will not boot any more, at least it will but then it fails. I suspect that the OS on there has problems of some sort.
A much better
I think you are right about my technical level, I am happy to use a terminal screen, I have done quite a bit of programming in the past and set up many databases for small companies, so not too bad. But I do not have any hardware experience.option is to PXE boot your installer over the network but that is decidedly non-trivial and probably not a realistic solution for you. Cheers
Neil -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq