Hi all:

I bought a old PC around Christmas. It had a floppy disk that would not read ANYTHING.   Then a few months later, the CD drive did the same THING. It says there's a problem with a PCI card but how do I find out which PCI card?   Now the  PC will not boot up at all and we can't reinstall windows without the CD drive working.

Any suggestions on where I should start with this?

Thanks,

dhanalakshmiIf you suspect a problem with the PCI cards - the first thing to do would be to remove them all.  Unless one is the graphics card - leave this in.  If it still won't boot, CHANGE the graphics card to a DIFFERENT slot.

Unplug the floppy drive completely (might as well eliminate that from the equation too).  If things still don't work, remove the CD-ROM as well.

If you can't get it working with minimum hardware, then either your problem isn't hardware related, or its more serious that one would hope for.

Also, if you post again post as many details about your system as possible - version of windows, motherboard model, amount and type of RAM, type of processor, etc.change the battery on the mobo is may have lost the bios settings...you say is old how old most cmos battery last appox 4 yearsIf it asks you to put in the time and date every time you boot its the battery. If not its not.

Id suggest you take out (or unplug) as much as possible (PCI cards, CD ROM, floppy ect) leaving only CPU, memory, Hard drive and Graphics card then SEE if it boots. If it does you can start eliminating other components.