Mark, well I have now got the replacement ebay bits & they work! I slightly resent having to send the £2.50 for postage for another one to be sent. But they say I can keep the defective one. If I returned the original it would have cost me that in postage as I would have sent it recorded delivery, as looking at their -ve feedback they don't seem to receive the faulty goods returned by customers!
Now the two IDE drives work, I always thought one had died. So I have found the old PC that they came out of gathering cobwebs in a stable. I have fitted in the RAM & some connectors I had pinched & intend to power this up. The good thing is that the W98 on this has a disc & licensed for this machine. When it died 5 years ago I wasn't so "adventurous" fiddling inside them so nothing to lose having a go.
Is the identity of a PC provided by the motherboard or is it in the windows that is installed?
So I now have 3 PCs in here with bits hanging out - even more chaotic than usual. I still need to retrieve more from my defective SATA drive. In the meantime on this machine I have installed Acronis True Image as back up. Last night I thought I created a back up in an external drive & it flashed & buzzed for 2 hours, only to find all it has done was to create a back up folder that is completely empty!