At one point I was using live CDs of Hiren's Recovery Boot CD and at least two other Linux distros - this, without having a HDD attached at all, in order to see if it was the HDD that was causing the problem. So, the answer is really that I had, at one time, no installed OS on the computer. The original OS, I believe, was Win XP. (I booted Hiren's (x86) up with both the Mini XP and the Linux recovery. Neither solved the problem...
At one point I was using live CDs of Hiren's Recovery Boot CD and at least two other Linux distros - this, without having a HDD attached at all, in order to see if it was the HDD that was causing the problem. So, the answer is really that I had, at one time, no installed OS on the computer. The original OS, I believe, was Win XP. (I booted Hiren's (x86) up with both the Mini XP and the Linux recovery. Neither solved the problem...
