Win95 not starting after switching hard drives with Vista

[nielka]

We have a Windows 95 and a Windows Vista. My brother and I opened the dusty 95 computer and cleaned the dust off with damp paper towels. Then we switched the hard drives, and here's what happened:

1) The 95 hard drive in the Vista: It started in MS-DOS only, and we added some files to it from a flash drive plugged in to the Vista, because the files were to large to transport via floppy. It worked.

2) The Vista hard drive in the Win95 computer: computer made the usual start-up noises, but nothing appeared on the monitor. The monitor connection was not loose.

So after all this, we returned the hard drives to their original locations. Now, the 95 turns on, but does not start up. It just does exactly what it had done with the Vista hard drive. The little orange hard drive light on the front turns off after the computer starts up. My brother thinks the problem may have been caused by wiping off the inside of the 95, or, it could have started with giving the 95 a different hard drive.
Anyone here have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Nicole

 

[popatim]

I do not believe the OS is your issue.
If you do not see the POST messages on the screen, "Press xxx (usually DELETE) to Enter Setup" being one of those messages, then you have something else going wrong.

 

[nielka]

Yeah... you can move it back if you want. I confuse the OS with the . . . other thingy. :\

The hard drive makes noises as usual, but doesn't continue to load. The monitor isn't getting any signal at all. I don't know much about how computers start up. What should happen next?-- do you think the problem is with the hard drive? Was putting the older hard drive into a newer computer a bad idea?

 

[Deleted member 1898488]

how damp were these paper towels?

 

[nielka]

Just damp, not dripping wet or anything.

 

[Deleted member 1898488]

It may have been enough to kill it.

 

[nielka]

What part of the computer do you think it might have damaged, to prevent the computer from booting?

 

[Deleted member 1898488]

Anything sensitive to water that you wiped. No way to know exactly what died

 

[nielka]

What I mean is, something in the computer is causing the computer to not function properly. Which "something," when damaged, would cause the computer to stop booting? This is the same "something" that, in a functional computer, starts running right after the PSU starts running. What part isn't doing its job?

 

[Deleted member 1898488]

it could be really anything on the motherboard. (processor, north bridge, RAM, cache, south bridge, co-processor...et al) like I said, there's no way to know what specific thing or things are broke, unless you replace literally everything on the computer until it works.

 

[nielka]

So do you think the hard drive is still ok-- the problem is with the computer?

 

[Deleted member 1898488]

Probably.