Hi

I’m currently attempting to fix an older Cicero model I’ve had since my mother fried the hard drive a few year ago. It’s an AMD Athlon XP 2200 I believe (although I may be wrong)

Anyways after concluding the older hard drive was too damaged to be recovered I bought a MAXTOR 250 gig hard drive for a good price and plugged it into my system. I ran the MAXTOR startup disc to partition and reformat my hard drive and I set my BIOS to boot using my CDROM

Once I placed my windows XP SP2 disc into my computer tower after boot up, and after going through steps 1-7 I suddenly get a blue screen error message that says one or more problems had occurred and the error message was as following

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Now I did some research and came to understand that the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error is caused by a buggy device driver or an actual hardware conflict. Now I haven’t recently added any new hardware except the MAXTOR hard drive. What could it possibly mean? Should I just randomly take out like PCI cards that may have been left over? What should I do?

What it could be and sounds like to me is that your motherboard does not support a hard drive that big since its an older model. but then i could very well be wrong.

The other thing is if there is data on the old hard drive that you want to get off the most common causeof this is the bearings going in the disk. To fix this stick the hard drive in the freezer thats right i said the freezer for a day or two and that will 99% of the time allow it to work just long enough to retrieve the data. Not really relevent to your post but a handy trick to know none the less.

This could be caused by a host of things...hardware usually. Last week a person on here was getting it due to a poorly seated video card, or broken video card...something to that effect. I have also seen memory chips cause problems. What you do is take EVERYTHING off the system except video, a stick of memory and HDD and try again. If you still get the error you can try swapping out devices until you figure out the culprit. Could be the mobo itself. I would be going after memory or a poorly seated/broken video card for this one first though.