new (old) comp boot problems

ok my mate gave me his comp because a guy he knew said it was beyond repair, (which i thought was a load of BS) so it came without a PSU or HDD,
i was thinkin i could use this comp as a personal server for my other 2 comps
so i pulled my PSU and HDD out from my other computer and stuck em in and BINGO she fired up, the only thing that i am asking about it that when it boots it says it does not recognize the cdrom or hard drive->(i think) and requires a boot disk

so in the meantime i stripped it apart to use its parts,
but once i get another psu and hdd i want to get it up and running,

from what i can see it has a

ECS P4S5A/DX+ Mobo,
Radeon 9200 Pro 128mb
Liteon cd burner,
256mb kingston ram
Intel Processor (dont know what kind)
and other various stuff,

so in conclusion.. would the problem be fixed if i get a clean formatted HDD?
would a 250-300w PSU be sufficient.. i think it should.

can anyone please give some suggestions...

 

hi, i'm not an expert but...

your friend actually wanted to throw those pieces away??? what you got landed with is an intel 478 mobo which generally performs faster than 775 chipset according to tomshardware. the graphic card would be an agp version and after some oclocking, it should run well for games more than 1 year old. for the psu, i'd try to get 400w for stability (although probably 350w true power will do just fine).

regarding the bootdisk message, some things you probably can try:

1) recheck jumpers on master & slave
2) redo cabling
3) put cdrom & hdd on different ide channels (you have 2 on mobo)
4) specify in bio instead of letting mobo detect

i'd definitely get a spare hdd, clean it up & install it plugged into this newly assembled system. let us know how it goes.

losc

 

what kind of performance can i get from this?

my current set up is a asus a7n8x deluxe mobo with a athlonxp 2600,

will this comp perform close to my system?

and as for the bio it didnt give me a chace to get into it ( i only booted it once)

 

Are you using your harddrive with OS, mb drivers, etc on this new system? If so you'll probably want to format and reinstall with the appropriate drivers.

 

yes i am, i just plugged a HD from another comp right in,
it should still boot though, later on i will try again