ok, so I lost a HD last night. It's fried. /cry So I dig through the stack of old computers and find this old dell. had a fried mobo. So I took the little 40g HD out of it and low and behold it worked. I plugged it in the Newer Machine (P5GDC Deluxe Mobo P4 3.2 2g Ram.) and I got the thing to boot. Logged in and after 10 minutes on the phone with Microsoft they let me re-use the dell Serial and transferred for me. Now is the point where I am dumbfounded. I now have a machine with a pre-existing OS but seeing as how it was a dell it had nothing but the basic set of drivers on it. So I can't get anything to work correctly. I have no ethernet (which is onboard) I have no access to gfx card, the cd rom won't show up under my computer (as far as I can tell the device manager still shows it as an Unknown device-although it shows in the BIOS as a bootable device). And the 3.5 floppy doesn't seem work either. (Not that I have any disks that aren't 10 years old) So I guess the question is can I make this work? I don't have the original Windows disc and I doubt that it would have anything usable on it otherwise. So should I just junk the HD get a new one and reinstall a brand new copy of windows? Or is there a way to salvage an otherwise legit OS on the working machine? Been up all night just trying to get the thing to accept incoming or outgoing data. And while it can see computers listed on the network it refuses to connect to any of them. Any advice would be better than stressing myself out over what appears to have an easy no-brainer solution. Thanks in advance.
