I've was trying to upgrade a friends old 486 from windows 3.1 to win 95. The CD drive is one that doesn't work with any of the drivers off a normal windows boot disk. I installed a newer cd drive that I knew would work with the boot disk, and was trying to set up the master/boot thing right, but the HD didn't have the pins labeled. Next think I know the computer won't boot and beeps like a madman. I determind that the 2 beeps means a parity error, whatever that is, and the following 8 beeps is something to do with the vid card. The weird thing is that when the HD isn't connected, the computer boots fine. I tried hooking a HD I know works, and the same thing happened, beeps. I know the IDE cable on the HD is hooked up correctly. hopefully someone can help, I don't wanna buy them a new computer :)

Did you go into setup after hooking up the new hard drive to find the new hard drive? Jumper settings for all hard drive manufacturers are available on the internet. For Quantum www.quantum.com and it is about the same for the rest of the manufacturers. Then click on support and make your way to jumper settings.

Where were you hooking up the CD-ROM? On 486 computers the CD-ROM usually had its own controller card or ran of the sound card. A BIOS that can only access 540 Mbytes has a problem with 650 Mbyte CD-ROMS. In some BIOSs you can disable parity checking.

If you're positive the cables are connected correctly it's got to be cmos settings and/or HD jumpers. You don't need to decipher the beeps when you know it's the hard drive.