Likewise with me......hard drive went down some while ago, at the time I thought it was possible malicious software. It wouldn't even boot in safe mode, bummer. As my machine is quite old (very old) I really couldn't be bothered sorting it out.....That's also why I haven't been around for a while.
Spec:
Asus a7n8x deluxe 2 mobo
Athlon xp 3000+
3 gig ram
Nvidia geforce 7300 gt
....anyway, I finally got around to sorting it out and I thought I'd post the progress here, as encouragment for prospective simmers who may have old rigs thinking "it's not worth it"....
The bad hd in question was a 70 gig maxtor ide thingy. I had a look through the mobo manual and noticed that it had 2 sata sockets so I purchased a 500gig western digital sata drive. ...The problems I had getting the PC to recognise it took days to sort out, it would not boot from sata. I had to go through dozens of possible bios upgrades to find one that would work.
In the end I reformatted and reinstalled the old ide hard drive and used that for the OS. I eventually found an "uber bios" but the sata drive still wouldn't work consistently, one minute it was there, next it would disappear
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