unclej

i recently needed to clean the hard drive on my hp pavilion 511w. i re-partitioned, cleaned everything off and installed windows se, the operating system that it's been running on for a while.

no obvious problems with the install but i have one problem and noticed something unusual. first the unusual. under the "my computer" icon on the desktop there is an equal sign..just a plain old = sign. anyone have any idea where it came from and what it means?

now the problem..i can't get the modem to work. after several attemps at removing and re-installing and trying to refresh the driver i physically removed it to see what it was. i downloaded the driver for it and even after that it won't work. when i try to connect to the internet i get "port disconnected due to hardware problem.

at the same time a friend gave me a newer pavilion..an xl876 in which the hard drive had crashed completely. to check for any other problems i pulled the hard drive from my pavilion and installed it into the 876 and i have the same modem problem. everything works except the modem and i get the same "port disconnected" message and i have the = sign on both computers. since i used the same hard drive in both computers i assume that it's something to do with the install of win98 that i did. any ideas?

Geekgirl

Any chance you can give us a screenshot of your desktop?

Just for fun, go to the Display Properties under the Effects tab and under Desktop Icons click Default Icon and see if it takes away the = sign

unclej

thanks for your reply..clicking default icon didn't change it. i don't have my camera here today so i can't get you a pic but it's the normal icon only just below it there is an = sign and something that i hadn't noticed yesterday there is a small dotted red line forming a square around the = sign.

something else this morning..i thought that there might be something corrupt in the win98se disk that i used install on the first computer so i got another disk from a different source and was going to just clean the hard drive up again and re-install the os but now the computer won't recognize any of the removeable drives. when i go into "my computer" after a regular startup it shows the floppy as "a", the first cd-rom as "d" and the cd\dvd as "e" but when i try to boot from a floppy boot disk it won't recognize "a" and for that matter when i start up in DOS it gives me an invalid drive specification notice on all three of them. i've tried using "f" and "g" to see if the computer took it upon itself to re-name the drives but get nothing there either.

it's gremlins isn't it?

Geekgirl

You dont need a camera to take the screenshot


Taking the screenshot
Microsoft Windows XP


* Pressing Alt-PrintScreen places an image of the frontmost window on the clipboard. Pressing PrintScreen by itself places an image of the entire desktop on the clipboard.
* Open MS-Paint. (From Start/Run, issue the command "mspaint".) Create a new empty image, and use Edit/Paste to bring in the screenshot you just took. (If the screenshot is smaller than the default Paint canvas, you'll end up with white areas. Start over: create a new empty image, change its dimensions to 1x1, and Paste again. The canvas will grow for the Paste, but it doesn't shrink.)
* Use MS-Paint to Save As, using PNG as the file format (it is superior to all the rest).

unclej

DOH! well, i'm one of those old farts that has win 98 on all three of my computers. can this still be done or is it just a function for those systems made this century? (insert smiley face)

unclej

hey geek girl..i was making this way too difficult..somewhere in the process of cleaning up this hard drive either i or the grimlins had simply re-named the icon. i just re-named it back so no more = sign. i have some other issues but my brain hurts so i'm gonna wait til next week. thanks for your willingness to help.

Geekgirl

Just reply back when your needing further assistance, I will keep this thread open