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#46
stettybet0

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Perhaps there is more than one thing wrong with the hard drive? You may have to get a new one, but as Titan pointed out, they are relatively cheap nowadays.
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#47
Seltox

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I'm about to go on a drive to a friends. I believe he has a spare 80gb SATA. I'm planning on buy a new one anyways. Get further in debt to my parents..woo..
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#48
Seltox

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Okay, all my new hardware is assembled, Windows installed and everything. I must say that I am very happy.

The motherboard is very cool with it's onboard POST indicator and the power on/reset buttons on the board itself. A CMOS clearing switch on the I/O panel rocks too.

Video card is very nice :) Running Dawn of War at full specs with persistent bodies and persistent scarring on without lag or anything (I can only go to 1280x1024 res though. Monitor limitation I believe). I ran a Company of Heroes test with the specs it came setup with, it averaged 33fps, but then I upped the specs to the full (1280x1024 again, antialiasing enabled and such) and it averaged 55fps. Odd, but it's fine with me.

The Memory... oh man I can't get over it. I love this stuff! Only problem with it is that I have a dual boot with 98SE set up right now, but it won't boot because apparently there isn't enough memory for it! ahahahaha.

I'm still exceedingly happy with my Power Supply and Case too. AND I even bothered to get a copy of SP2, so my USB's are working at real speeds now. I still havn't installed Battlefield 2 or Quake Wars or anything, so we'll see how the First Person games go later on (LAN PARTY AT MY PLACE THIS WEEKEND! ^_^).

Thanks for all the recommendations guys.

I'm going to buy a new HDD and dvd burner soon (both SATA). Any suggestions for that? I'm just looking at a 320gb seagate barracuda or something.
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#49
Titan8990

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Good to hear :).

Any name brand manufacturer of HDDs is usually good. The Seagates that you mentioned come with a 2yr long warrenty then most companies: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822148140.

DVD burners are pretty much the same. Some are slightly better than other but typically not by much. http://www.newegg.co...N82E16827151154
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#50
Seltox

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Okay, after checking all my costs and how much money I have, I can only afford to get a dvd-drive :)
I'm postponing the HDD purchase. I had to go through some terrible stuff to get Windows on this HDD. I plugged the HDD into a different computer and installed 98SE on the C:, I then started the XP install from inside 98SE. After it copied the files onto the D: and restarted the computer, I took the HDD out, and plugged it into MY computer. I finished the Install process from there.

Anyway. I've been looking at this. I was reading up about it, and it said that it's compatable with XP, 2000, NT and Vista. Does this mean I won't be able to install 98SE on it and such? Will it work with Linux, and Will I be able to boot off of it into DOS?
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#51
Troy

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Well that does sound like a hassle! I think you've done well to get it all sorted out, I don't think I would have bothered going that far! :)

That DVD burner looks expensive, here's one for $35 (but then you would need to add in postage). No wonder you can't afford a new HDD also!

I would assume (I could be wrong) that the DVD drive would be available for all OS's, but I could be wrong. The only thing I can think of is that 98SE was not designed to burn DVD's, probably even CD's at that! So it might have limited function...

But your BIOS should recognise it no problems, you'll be able to boot off it no worries :)

Cheers

Troy
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#52
Seltox

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I tend to only really look at pcccasegear most of the time, as it has $10 postage to my house ($10 to post a huge Antec Nine Hundred. awesome.)

Anyway, I'm presuming having a SATA cd/dvd drive will fix my problem. My problem being that I have only a single PATA/IDE/Whatever port on my motherboard, and I ended up having to run both a dvd burner and a harddrive off of it.

When I booted up into DOS via a DOS boot cd, or a 98SE boot cd, I could not access the contents of my CD drive. (if I typed H:, it would say there was no drive. I checked fdisk and stuff to make sure that was correct. drives c through g were being used, which leaves h for cd). The reason I need to access this drive is - I boot up into DOS, take out the boot cd, and put in my Win XP cd. Then I do H:\i386\winnt.exe. Without access to the H: I can't do this. (Yay for installing XP through dos. <3 it ^_^).
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#53
Titan8990

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Personally, I'm all for doing away with PATA altogether. But something to keep in mind is that a change from ATA100 to SATA2 HDD will directly impact the performance of your machine whereas adding a SATA DVD burner won't do much other than clear that extra spot the IDE cable.

Edited by Titan8990, 03 February 2008 - 11:00 AM.

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