Hard Drive Crashed, and now...

XP, Dell Dimension 8400 P4 3GHz, etc ,etc ,etc.

My hard drive crashed, which was bad enough. Replaced it with Seagate 160GB drive which took quite a bit of tweaking... BIOS settings, diagnostics, load this, remove that... you know the drill. Finally got it working and reloaded XP on it (from my Dell Recovery disk) with the intent of going straight on to the 'net and updating everything before reinstalling all my software.

That's when I noticed it... no network connection (broadband). So I try to set up a new connection and it says it should already be set up. So I look in Device Manager and the following devices are not working:

Ethernet Controller
Multimedia Audio Controller
PCI Modem
SM Bus Controller
Unknown Device
Video Controller
Video Controller (VGA Compatible)

It doesn't recognize my dual monitors, it won't play music or vids, and of course I can't network with anything. Just so you know, ALL this stuff worked perfectly prior to installing the new hard drive and reinstalling XP... nothing is any different than I had it for the last couple years. I don't get why swapping out the drive would bust all that other stuff, so I've come here for help... I need a point in the right direction. I can't even guess where to start with all this stuff.

Any help?

Thanks!

Skip Reilley

p.s. I had XP totally and faithfully updated to SP2 before the crash, but my reload disks are at least a couple years old... which is why I was trying to update everything. Would buying the latest shelf version do any good?

 

You need to load drivers for all of these devices and your motherboard/chipset.

 

Uh... yeah, that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is: why doesn't the XP reinstallation CD do this? I didn't have to manually load them the first time... why now?

And since I can't connect and download, I'll have to burn them and copy them I suppose. Sounds like fun

Thanks for the pointer.

Skip