Well, all is now well in P.C. land. Many thanks to all who helped out along the way. I thought y'all might want a "final" update.
The hard drive and the CD-RW were both shot in the "bad" P.C. I went ahead and purchaced both at Wally World for about $100 total. Installed both, restored the XP operating system using the restore disks, and the "bad" P.C. came right up. No worries, me thinks, right? Read on, McBeth.
So I go to rebuild the network around the "bad" pc (remember, it was being used as the Gateway/Server). Nothing works. The now rebuilt bad PC can access the internet and ping all of the other PC's in the network, but the other "good" PC's can't log into the internet, share files or see the printer. I screwed around with it for two evenings before I finally figured out what was going on.
The basic LAN problem is the Microsoft "home networking" wizard/setup program. It doesn't work. I ran the wizard a couple of times in an attempt to straighten everything out, no good. I tried many different settings for the various network functions around the LAN on the various computers. In the end, I wound up setting up the LAN settings on each computer manually and things slowly began to come back to life. As an example, the wizard set the internet connection to the lan card that connects to the internet modem, rather than the Mindspring virtual connection that I created as part of the normal internet setup. Go figure.
For all of you Apple users out there, I spent about four hours yesterday loading service packs and security patches back on the bad pc. This was one of the early XP machines so I had about 3 years of stuff to download. An entire afternoon spent just configuring the operating system.
Pick, your advice is well taken. Now that the bad computer is now working again, the only thing that is loaded on that computer is the operating system, anti-virus software and so forth. I intend to give it a few days to let things "settle down", so to speak. After that, I will load a few of the old programs at a time until it is all loaded. Then go back and "Cherry pick" the old files off the old bad drive to a portable zip drive, scan them with anit-virus software, then reload them onto the new drive a few at a time.
What a time consuming nitemare. But, like old Airstreams, they can be resurrected.
Jim
|