STORM2K

In another thread I mentioned that someone gave me a computer (Gateway P-III 866 mhz, 10-gig hard drive, OEM loaded Windows ME). I put in a network card and upgraded it to 256 meg RAM and thought I'd be good to go.

It turns out that the previous owner didn't really know what she was doing and she loaded a program called Cyber Patrol. It totally blocked internet access and she had no idea how it got on there or how to get through it. That's why she gave the computer away.

I looked for work-arounds and they exist, but the instructions consisted of about 3 pages of registry changes. I didn't want to go through all that.

I took out the hard drive and put it in another older gateway machine I have, and used the recovery CD that I had for it to reinstall windows ME. That was sucessful and I put the hard drive back in to the new machine. As it booted up it went through the process of finding the drivers for the hardware on that machine. The mouse and keyboard (both USB) were responding but then it got stuck looking for a driver for the SMBus Controller. A wizard popped up asking if I wanted it to search for the best driver. But when that wizard popped up, the keyboard and mouse stopped responding. I can't get past this.

Interestingly, I can start the computer in safe mode and the mouse and keyboard work fine but the CD player doesn't respond.

I googled it some and it seems that the needed driver is specific to that chipset and/or motherboard. I went to intel's site and they offer an .exe file which is supposed to help the computer proceed. It didn't give any instructions though on where to put this file or how to use it. It's too big to go on a floppy disk, and I can't burn it on a CD (on another compter) because the CD player doesn't work in safe mode.

I'm about ready to take it to a shop to have them install an OS. A new registered version of XP would cost about $250. A reinstallation of ME would be about $100.

Can anyone give some suggestions on how to proceed?

Something like this might work.

http://tinyurl.com/384dqu

Your machine can probably be booted in dos mode or from a dos system disk.

Use the bridge cable to move the big files.

Parallel data Xfer cables that connect printer ports are easy to borrow or buy.
The simplest printer port connection should work ok even in dos.

the .exe might extract to some driver files that you can either move to the appropriate driver folder or point your wizard too.

The files needed could be put on a USB Flash drive. They are fairly cheap and plenty big for the files. If the other usb devices work it should self install..even in ME and function like a added hard drive. Yes it sounds like you need the motherboard chipset and then you might need to update drivers in Device Manager as well to get everything fully installed.

I do have a thumb drive and tried that. While it recognized the USB mouse and USB keyboard in safe mode, it didn't recognize the USB drive. Also this machine has no serial or parallel ports. No PS-2 mouse or keyboard jacks either. It's all USB.

When I booted in safe mode I was able to go to My Computer\Properties\Device Manager which allowed me to view and potentially update the drivers for all the devices.

I also went to a site (on anothe computer) and paid $4.95 to download the driver that I thought I needed. It fit on a floppy. I put it in the machine in question and it recognized the floppy drive in safe mode. I picked the device that appeared to be the one in question but it said that it already had the best driver installed. I could go through them all one-by-one and pretend to update the driver to see what message I get.

At this point I think I'll pay the $100 for a shop to look at it. I've already spent about 20 hours messing around with this. I would have been better off spending the time doing overtime at work and paying someone that knows what they are doing to fix it.

Thanks for the input.