Installing Ubuntu on a Diseased Racked PC.

[ed5000]

Thanks Mentalelf! It was worth a try. I found the "CLR CMOS" pins. It was the 3 pin type like you mentioned. It definitely reset something as there was a message and I had to reset the date and time, but still no CD rom or USB. I tried to turn off and on the different drives and rebooted it several times as well.

[Radioman991]

My 0.02

While you may have other problems, I found in my Dell, the DVD ROM drives they installed 3 or 4 years ago, out of the blue just stopped burning CDs and DVDs. It was an issue with the cheap drives they installed. After a while, Windows didn't even think there was a drive installed!

You might Google the model number of the drive to see if it has some weirdness in other people's systems.

Since that time, I have replaced the drive, and now the OS too!

Good Luck

Radioman991

[ed5000]

Thanks Radioman. I had two cd drives in there and they both went at the same time. I also tried another cd drive I borrowed from another computer but it didn't work either. Time to get something a little newer.

Do you want to know something funny? My wife just opened her laptop and found the screen cracked with big spider web cracks. All the way though too. Our two year old was spotted carrying it through the house. Looks like I'll need all the computer repair skills I can get! :^)

[ed5000]

Here is an update on the old family Dell computer whose cd, dvd rom drives and USB ports quit working:

Well after disassembling the Dell I found the 4 pin CPU power plug was kind of melted and burnt up where it connects to the motherboard. I'm not sure why it took out cd rom drives but, apparently it did.

So what I did do is go out and buy (and assemble) a MSI K9N6PGM2-V2 motherboard with an AMD Athlon X2 250, 3.0 Ghz dual core processor plus 4 gigs of memory and a case and I moved over the two cd drives and the 250 gig sata drive and then installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.04 and Bam! I have a hotrod computer! Keep me off the forum now!

Okay, seriously I know it's not the fastest computer in the world but, after running 5 years on windows xp with clogged up registry files, it's fast!

Thanks to those that helped troubleshoot (and shoot) the old Dell PC and thanks for ideas for this new one. All of you keep up the good work!

ed5000