big problem

[enhanced08]

i am having a big problem with my moms HP. its an older one which came with a 466 celly. i came across a 500mhz celly for the right price (Free) and decided to upgrade it a little for her. that was about 2 months ago and i have had no problems with it untill now. the computer is "moms only" but my little brothers and sisters like to get on and goto websites and get a lot of spyware on it. i installed spybot and adaware to get rid of all of it along with a virus scan. the problem is that, i never get on it and no one else ever downloads the updates or runs the scans. well it finally started acting funny and mom ask me to look at it so i did and there was a TON of spyware on it! i updated adaware/spybot/virus scan and ran them, before i got a chance to run the virus scan it said it needed to restart, ok no big deal. i restart it.....

when it boots it acts like its a fresh install of win98! enter name, cd-key, etc. the problem is it came with an HP recvery disk and doesn't have a cd-key. what i did was decide to reinstall the system. i put the recvery disk in and boot from it, select format and recover. it formats then throws up an error "can't read from device M" i try to "retry" it and it throws up the error again, "fail" does the same. "abort" goes back to the recovery screen and says "recovery has been aborted"

whats going on and how do i fix it??? the drive is formated so backing up data is not a concern. would it be because of the different cpu installed?

[jimmyrules712]

well if it is booting up fine then your hardware should be fine. If i were you i would try to get a windows 98 se from someone or somewhere, they are really cheap to buy now (check ebay, or make a post in our PCmech trading post asking for a windows 98 SE cd and cdkey, heck I've even got an old extra i can sell you.)

and try installign windows with that.

[enhanced08]

.... well i got a win98 se disk and made a boot disk but it wont boot from floppy! there is no option in the BIOS to boot from floppy!! could this be some kind of virus or something?

[piasabird]

If your floppy drive was bad or not installed it might not have that option.

[enhanced08]

it should (it was anyway) be working fine, i don't know what would have caused it to fail.

[enhanced08]

i just realized something..... the second time i hit a for abort it says "Restoring Files" at the top and it has a bunch of information about an "unpacking utility" then it has 2 bullets which say. 80486 CPU detected and the second says XMS Version 3.00 detected. after that it has the CD101: Not ready reading from drive M (abourt, retry fail) error again.

would this be caused by my putting the faster CPU in it? its an HP and i know that if you would try putting that OS (the one that came with it) on a different machine it will detect that there are different parts and not work.

EDIT: the cpu number is 80486. i also tried putting the 466 cpu back in it and that didn't help any.

[enhanced08]

anyone have any ideas? i really need to get this fixed

[ROYP123]

I think you have a scratched or damaged restore CD that fails at different locations. . Check to see if you have an HP partition that has the restore info in it. -usually D drive. If so restore from that. .Even when you format, it just formats C: and the restore D: stays there. ..unless you Fdisk and delete the restore partition. If yours has no restore partition on the hard drive, ( and if I am correct about the damaged restore disk) then you can fdisk /format and load Win 98 without the proprietary support and software. Their machine may not boot from a floppy, but will from a Win 98 CD. The problem has nothing to do with a different cpu.( also, - try to clean the restore CD if it is not scratched deeply.) HTH
edit: it could also be that the CD Rom is flaky.

[enhanced08]

well i will look at the disk and see if there is any deep scratches and see if it will read in another system. i can't boot from floppy tho. there is no option in BIOS todo this. weird. also i clicked "restore defaults" in BIOS (all pcs are set to boot from floppy by default) hoping that i just missed the menu somehow, but that didn't work either.