My next door neighbor asked me to take a look at her computer and I determined that the psu was dead and so was the board. I tried a good psu and the board was still dead.

I took the hdd...an old ( don't laugh!) Seagate 4.3 Gig with 98SE and hooked it up to my other system by just switching the Ide cable & power connectors. It boots right up but only in safe mode. I ran the tool that checks for drive errors...it found none...and then defragged it. So the hdd seems to be in good shape.

Is there something simple that I am missing? She had dial up for access and I have cable modem...does that have anything to do with this?

When I first booted up, there were lots of "found new hdw"...and it loaded tons of new hdw. & drivers...but there were some pci devices that it could not find drivers for: communication,ethernet controller,USB device...all of these are present when I have the original hdd hooked back up.

I have a couple more questions but let's start with this safe mode first...