Corrupt system can do almost nothing

The Omen said:

I have already tried removing the internal battery. The reason was more to do with the fact that the system date had returned to 01 01/2007 which indicated the original battery was failing. However the voltage was in fact 3.15 volt. The replacement battery installed some time later was 3.35volts. I am uncertain that there really had been battery failure.

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I cannot help thinking that the installation disk I have for Windows 7 no longer works or is it a Bios problem. When I tried the system with the defective new graunshing ide drive it found the drive but then reported there was no boot record. Am I being simplistic in the hope that no boot record would mean it would try the next drive looking for a boot record, that would be the windows installation disk. When I was playing I did try to run the system with only the windows installation disk. The machine seemed to go sleepy byes and never reported said a word.
So bad Bios or bad installation disk or is everything just junk. Must be getting fed up.

Don't try to buy an IDE drive. The problem is new IDE drives haven't been made in over 10 years. Even if the drive is supposed to be unused or refurbished there is no guarantee how long they will last.

I tried that earlier this year. The IDE drive I got showed 0 hours on it but it failed after only running 1 hour. I returned it and got my money back. I gave up on trying to use IDE drives on my 20 year old computers. Now they are both using SATA drives. Even the 300GB SATA drives I bought are refurbished but at least they are a lot newer than the IDE drives I tried to buy.

BTW, one motherboard has 2 SATA ports so was easy to use SATA drives. The other motherboard didn't. I had to use a SATA PCI card for the SATA drives.

You said you replaced the BIOS battery? After that did you set the date/time in the BIOS? With a good battery the computer should keep time even if the computer is unplugged.

In response to a comment in my mail but not yet in this forum. I have disconnected all disk drives from the system leaving only the dvd with the windows installation cd/dvd in place. When I boot the system absolutely nothing happens - there are zero comments. To me this the following three things
The installation disk has become faulty
The Bios system is not allowing access
There is a hardware fault with the dvd drive

I think I can create another system with a different dvd drive to eliminate a couple of the above problems and if successful replace the existing dvd drive in the problem machine. This only leaves the Bios situation. I am not sure if I replace the CMOS chip will have any impact on the Bios. Frankly I am in a territory that is rather alien to me with CMOS and Bios

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I agree with your comments re SATA and IDE drives and as I am in the fortunate position of having little or no information on my corrupt system I am freed from IDE.

Regarding the system date, I have admit that the system had lost th current date a while ago. I reset it but at that stage did not change the battery. To be honest I had not tracked the date and only noticed it had returned to 01/01/2007 when the system corrupted. As I said earlier the old battery was still showing 3.15volt. So whether the date problem was caused by the battery or by the system gradually corrupting itself over time is a question not easily answered. Certainly there was a period during which things were failing before my eyes until everything gave up.

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I am a discouraged and alarmed that a comment made by another forum member (megahertzo07) is not recorded here and neither is my response. The only reason I know of this is through my electronic mail system.