hi dale,
the drive was wiped, the cables are fine. as i said i have successfully
installed winxp on the drive and it functions, just slower than it would be
if it were running ME.

--
Nathan W. Collier
http://UtilityOffRoad.com
http://7SlotGrille.com


"DEJ57" wrote in message
...
a friend dropped off his compaq presario desktop 5251 after wiping the
harddrive by vaccuming out the case (got the vaccum to close to the hard
drive). im attempting to reinstall his system for him but i dont have
any
of the original software.
i have no problem installing xp pro on the machine. it boots to the cd
reliably and installs/runs but obviously the machine is a little bit slow
and would be better suited with 98/ME.
i have every generic MS boot disk (dos/95/95b/98/98se/me) but the machine
will not boot to them. every time i try to boot to the floppy boot disk
i
get an I/O error, "remove disk and press any key to continue". i know
the
boot disks are good because i can boot my generic computers with them.


Its hard to believe the vacuum wiped the drive. Are you sure? How do you
know
if you can't boot? My gut guess would be that you knocked loose a data
cable
with the vac...

Dale