NEC Computer is having swine flu (or bios issues)

[shovenose]

i have an nec ready 9619. it has a penium 166mhz cpu (not kidding), well, anyway, the hd in it died, and so i went to put in a different one. the only thing it seems to be able to do is say "disk read error" at startup. i think it has something to do with the bios being limited to 8.4gb hard drives, and me trying to put in a 80gigger, but even with a smaller hard drive in it or even having no hd and tryinhg to boot from a kubuntu cd, all i get is a "disk read error, press ctrl-at-del to restart". p1 166mhz, 64mb ram, promotion onboard graphics, 0gb hd hahaha. well, what can i do to this thing to make it work (ps, has no usb ports!)

 

[roonj]

I wanted a car but my bike still works so! maybe the hd didn't die maybe the controller on board is bad?

 

[shovenose]

i tested the hd on a different machine using superfdisk, it said my hd has 700+ bad sectors, maybe the controllers bad, ur right. :-(
what will i do, how can i test it
ps the pc worked fine with win95. its when i tried to install winxp the problems started. what will i do..?

 

[shovenose]

now ive got it as far as "operating system not found." i tried a different cd drive, and now the only drive i have in CD. no floppy or hd. i tried kubuntu booting off of the disc, but it just says "operating system not found." the kubuntu disc works, since ive used it in other computers, well, actually one other computer!
any ideas?is kubuntu incompatible?

 

[shovenose]

update....
i have gotten as far as being able to boot into superfdisk. currently, using primary ide, i have wdc 10gb as the master and a different cd-rom drive as slave. as afore mentioned i can boot into superfdisk. unfortunately, though i can use superfdisk, its a little messed up because the bios can ony do 8455mb hard drive max. size.
however, when i try to boot into kubuntu or windows xp or 2000 setup, it doesnt recognize it and just says "OS not found"

 

[pyro944]

can you set up a partition for the max size and use that for the OS?

 

[shovenose]

well i have tried running superfdisk, but im not sure exactly how to make a single partition on the hd, cause its only 8455mb and if i make a max size partition on that will i be able to still use the hard drive
by the way:if suprfdisk reports several thousand bad sectors on three of my perfectly good hard drives do they really had bad sectors or is superfdik lying to me.

 

[shovenose]

update: i abandoned this project. thank you for those who spent their time trying to help me. i appreciate it.