I crashed "ME"

[Hunker]

My A: drive will not light up first. My cd rom light comes on. My cdrw light comes on but my keyboard does not light up. My monitor comes on with a "no signal" - I replaced the keyboard with a USB keyboard no change. I replaced the A: drive and it just stays on and will not stop. I even inserted the boot disk and "ME" will not read it.....???
Matt

[teyrn]

First answer some questions for me.
1. is your video card part of the motherboard or do you have a AGP or PCI graphics card.
2. Before you replaced the floppy drive the light wouldn't come on first but would at a later point after the hard drive and cdrom drive or just not light up at all?
3. Are you able to boot into ME at all?
From your post I would question the motherboard as the keyboard floppy drive and monitor all seem to not work properly. USB devices in a system as old to be running ME required the operating system to load before any USB device would work at all. USB devices don't work unless drivers are loaded. In newer computers USB devices can be read and used by the bios and work outside the operating system. This is probably why your USB keyboard doesn't work unless you are getting into windows and it still isn't working. That would lead me back to your motherboard failing.

http://www.tuath.org/files/sig.jpg

[Hunker]

Tey, it does not have a graphic card. The A: floppy drive never would light up until I replaced it and the second one will light up but not read a 3 1/4 floppy and stays running and will not stop. ME will not boot at all. I tried to trick it with the driver disk but nothing happened. I thought about copying the boot disk to a cd and try that but I have not tried it yet. I agree with you that the motherboard has retired. Can you pull out the hard drive and somehow copy info from it to my laptop?
Thanx,
Matt

[Millard]

Hello Matt,

If you'll email me at menglish@sowega.net, I'll send you the name and phone number of a friend in your area (Buford Hwy. of I85) that may be able to assist you.

Millard

[teyrn]

yeah Matt the data on the hard drive is intact. Getting to it from your laptop would require an external drive case that will take an IDE hard drive and allow it to be accessed via USB. They run about 45+ dollars. Another way would get a friend with a desktop computer to install your hard drive in their system and burn your data to CD for you. Millard seems to have a friend that could help with this. Copying a bootable floppy disk to CD does not make a bootable CD.

http://www.tuath.org/files/sig.jpg

[Hunker]

Thanks Tey and Millard, I have most of my data on cd except one that has a USDF (sp?) format that crashes my rom drive on my laptop for some reason but I can take it to work and burn hopefully.
Well I guess it is time to say goodbye to "ME" and like a loved one or pet I become attached to my computers and feel a loss at our parting.I first layed eyes on "ME" at the pawn shop I go to over three years ago. "ME" had a 40 gig hard drive, cd rom + cdrw rom."ME" was the first computer I could afford with the restore feature that I could afford."ME" had a past love that name was Lelia Winfield. No matter how many times I restored "ME" I never could wipe out the memory of "Lelia". Lelia had a secret love of Big Booty.I loved "ME" anyway for many years of faithful service.I love and will always remember my first and last "ME".
Matt

[jaredanstee]

A floppy drive whose light stays on is usually caused by the data cable being plugged in upside down. Unplug the wide grey cable from the back of the drive and then plug it in the other way.

Yours truly,
Jared Anstee
http://jaredanstee.com

[Hunker]

Originally posted by Jared Anstee:

A floppy drive whose light stays on is usually caused by the data cable being plugged in upside down. Unplug the wide grey cable from the back of the drive and then plug it in the other way.

Yours truly,
Jared Anstee


Thanks Jared I did not see this until today. I think I did that but when I get home I will try again.
http://jaredanstee.com