The $4 HP Project. Need some help.

aPanzerIV

Daemon Poster
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Ok, so I bought this like new HP Pavilion a700n for $4, yes, $4, at an action the other day,and turns out it works fine.
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So I plan to turn it into a computer that should last another 2-3 years.
And to say the least It has overpaid itself, but has a few, issues, so to speak.

It came with a cd-r hooked to one ide, and a hdd hooked to another on 2 different slots. The cd-r would keep trying to play this music cd and never open, so it went to the trash pile, and i hooked up a different cd-r to the hdd line, and it worked.

Then I decided to finnally hook up my unused new sony DVD-R sata,and it works great on both sata ports.

(you might be wondering where im headed with this, but you'll see.)

So the computer origionally came with this 80GB WD ide drive, and all my steam stuff barely fits on this 100 in my laptop.

I want to hook up a second hdd, and I have 2, both are these seagate 160 gig drives.
One is Sata, one is IDE.

I hooked up the sata, and it didnt show up. I tried everything, different cable, different port. The drive did not show up. The DVD-R works fine on both Sata ports though.

So then I went to the IDE drive. Same problem, and both origional HDD and CD-R work on either port.

And Then I have one last problem with it. It has this memory Card reader on the front:
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The auction guy turned the PC on, which came with this sorry a$$ 16mb CF stick, and it showed up in the origional OS(pos virusy thingy). I unplugged it and dusted it out, replugged it in, and it wont detect anything. tried the cable, zip.

Most of its specs are likley to change by the time i'm done with it, but while I'm here, might as well do so.

-AS bought specs:
Amd Athlon XP 3000+
512Mb DDR 400 Hylink Ram
80Gb WD Caviar IDE ATA 133
XP Home(5 acounts with norton virus crap on it)
S3 Mirrage Unichrome
-Current Specs (everything in it was used around here, all free :D)
Amd Athlon XP 3000+
1024mb DDR400 2x 512 Hylink Ram
80GB WD Caviar IDE ATA 133
XP Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 256mb

-Desired Specs
Amd Athlon XP 3200+
2048mb DDR400 2x 1024 Kingston 2 CAS
80GB WD Caviar IDE ATA 133 + (160GB SG 7200 Sata I + 160GB SG IDE in raid 0)
XP Pro
ATI Radeon X1550(lootin' from mah old comp lol)

Any help would be appreciated, thank you ahead of time.

Some more pics:

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congrats on the great purchase :) As for the new 160gb drives not being detected im thinking a BIOS upgrade might help??
 
Or they might not be enabled in the BIOS to start off with.

Since the SATA optical drives work I'm willing to write this off and say the drives are just not initalized/formatted. Also, most of those older HPs did not support RAID so have you confirmed that the motherboard supports it?
 
Im going to check the bios after i finnally get the download from hp, internets getting lazy, whenever i walk away i come back and it says that it could not find it and then redownloads a pittiful 243 bytes and says its done... the download is about 4mb, not even close to 243 bytes...

Stupid sprints fixing to say bye...

Edit:
Found a NICE 9800XT on ebay, slightly faster than X1550

Got it up finnally, not much of a change, apears in bios, not in windows... clicked on lotsa stuff, nothing... was planning on getting a raid 0 just to improve system speed, maybe that would help?

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you could even try using windows 7 on it. Since you said you wanted it to last 2-3 years and xp will be mostly unsupported before then. What will this computer be used for
 
Have you reformatted the new hard drive since trying to install it? Windows gets kinda weird about new drives sometimes. Use either Gparted or the Windows install disc. If it doesn't show up in those, I'm gonna say it's the compaq BIOS issue that prevents most drives from working on their older computers.
 
ok...

What bios issue?

Well, older compaqs and HPs had this problem with their BIOS that made them extremely picky about which hard drives they worked with. For example, my dad's old P4 compaq rejected all four drives I tried to use in it. The only one that I could get working is the POS it came with.
 
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