Musician Needs to upgrade, but how and what?

vasser

vasser

Geek Trainee
About a decade ago I built a Pentium 4 XP Pro machine with RAMBUS (I know) that worked good until motherboard started acting goofy following recent thunderstorm. Bought new old stock mobo, and it goes straight to a boot failure so I've decided I need to just get a working computer and put my drives in it. I basically use this machine for MUSIC projects and very light website editing, nothing fancy and no gaming or anything like that. It has a Turtle Beach sound card that I like a lot.

It has two IDE/PATA hard drives. One 500 gig storage drive for music projects and one 250 gig operating system drive.

The problem is that everything today is SATA not PATA. What are my options? The current machine will not start at all and yields a boot error.

I'm looking at used newer faster machines, on eBay. They are SATA. Would I be better off to clone my existing drives to new SATA drives (more expensive), or are PATA/IDE to SATA adapters actually workable for an operating system? I realize PATA is slower than SATA, but it was plenty fast enough before to get the work done. I'm not interested in gaming, just listening to and recording music and some light web editing. I'm only interested in running XP because the recording software I use and some of the hardware, like the soundcard, only works with an OS up to XP and will not work with 7 or 8.

I just want my existing drives in a working machine, or if that isn't possible somehow clone both drives. There's a lot of music and stuff on these drives, plus all my recording/editing software. I no longer have all the install discs for the software and don't want to buy it again.

I really don't want to spend a lot of money and certainly not over $600 for the machine. I just want something to make all the software on the operating system drive work and get to the music files on the storage drive plus use the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard. Sounds simple but I'm finding out it isn't.

IDEAS? OPTIONS? Thanks in advance. Dave
 
It sounds like you will have to build a New Computer, that way you can have it the way you want it.. BUT you will have to find out what socket Motherboard you want/need to use.... They make allot of Motherboards these days the can handle both kinds of Hard drives.. Not sure about your sound card though.. Is it just a PCI slot card?
 
Yea! You can get it to work with Windows 7, But not Windows 8 ..Just have to install in compatible mode. I am running Windows 7 on allot of my computer using Windows XP drivers..
 
Guess you missed the part about I must continue to use my existing hard drives because I no longer have access to the install discs for the software which costs a fortune. Ex wife threw it away. Software cost more than the computer. So I need to use the existing drives. That means it is XP Pro.
 
What Motherboard are you using right now? Is all you important software backed up to hard drive #2? Do you have a Windows XP Setup disk? Your Problem is
With a new Motherboard the Drivers will All be Different... But If you could fine the same Motherboard you have now, then everything would work..just upgrade everything else.
 
No xp setup disc, it is gone. Board is an Intel D850/D850EMV2 which I replaced with a board with the same numbers on it, but the replacement is slightly different in that it is a Gateway OEM board and the connector arrays are slightly different lacking a fan connector and onboard soundcard. I had used one of these boards on another replacement of a retail Intel 3 or 4 years ago and it worked fine. This time no go. I don't have ANY software discs except anti-virus. Went through divorce and ex wife threw them away. So that's where I am.
 
The other time I used one of these boards it worked fine to replace the same board as the one that failed here on another computer I had built at roughly the same time as this one. This time I got a "boot failure" then it won't start AT ALL. It won't even power up.

I don't have backups of anything but the music files. No program backups.
 
Ok! let me look up your Motherboard and see what I can find out... Like what socket it is, and so on..

Ok, It looks like that Motherboard is a 478 socket, What CPU are you using? What speed?
They made allot of 478 socket Motherboards, Dell / IBM/Compaq/HP/Gateway/eMachine ...They all used them.. Anyway, I found a couple of the same Motherboards that you have..
eBay has a few, and place called Buy.com has some.. It will depend on where you live at..
There Price goes from $14.00 bucks to $47.00 and up.. You might be able to buy a use
Dell dimensions 2400 for reasonable and just customize it...
 
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