On Friday our IBM Netvista 2257-33U running XP SP2 crashed. We recently purchased Belkins 3 port Firewire, Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0, Iomega 160 gig external drive and an HP Photosmart printer.
All was working fine until Friday. On Friday after AVG completed it's update and test I was asked to reboot, so of course I did. The harddrive did not come back up. Had to start using the boot disk and ran scandisk which found 266 bad sectors out of 2 million. Since Friday afternoon we have not been able to get the pc to recognize the USB, printer, or external drive. Of course the external drive has our backup on it.
My husband was so frustrated he went yesterday and bought a new Western Digital 200 gig internal drive in hopes that this will cure the harddrive issues, but I still am unable to get the USB issue resolved. The external drive is connected to the usb so the computer does not recognize the drive at all.
I ran the BIOS Wizard per other posts in this forum. When I click on the link to update the BIOS it opens that window but get the error that the program will be shut down when I click on check BIOS.
(Never buy your pc through the IBM employee site...POS)
I have not installed the new internal harddrive as of yet. Was hoping to get the external drive working to back up XP sp1 that is currently embedded on the pc but I cannot get the usb to be recognized or the drive.
Since the only backup that we could restore to was from Jan. 2003 we did not have sp2 loaded. When we loaded SP2, it continually tells us that we need drivers which would be located in SP1 so we are unable to intall those drivers. My husband uninstalled SP2 last night to see if we could download all needed drivers but of course the only update is SP2....Catch22...
Any hints or suggestions which do not involve throwing this pc in the trash and us writing a nasty note to the IBM employee purchasing program. My husband is thinking of retiring from IBM after 32 years but this would probably not be a good idea.
The BIOS Wizard did say that this pc could be booted from the cd rom but I am unsure how to do this also as it reads the A drive, blinks on the cd rom drive briefly even when a bootable cd is in the drive.
Another issue regarding the new internal drive:
It says in the install instructions not to stand the drive up, yet the Maxtor drive that is in the pc is upright. Do you know of any issues if I put this drive in the location of the original one, or should I lay it down and hope the cabling reaches?
Thank you all for any assistance!
