6G Celicas Forums

OK, here is the problem. My mother shut her PC (2ghz celeron EMachine; WinXP) down 4 days ago, and like usual left it to shut off. Well when she came back it didnt shut down. It was just sitting there with the keyboard,mouse,and tower light flashing all syncranized(sp?). So we switched out the power supply since the fan wouldnt turn on it. Nope, that wasn't the problem. So we then decided to take the hard drive and connect it to 2 other PC's we had sitting around the house.

One of them is a 733Mhz Hewlett Packard. When we connect it it says a disk error. Then we tried the other PC. Which is slower then a 1.3 but faster than the HP. We connected it and it got to the point of loading up to safe mode, but then it just sits there along with all the other modes.

So any ideas of what might be wrong? And Do you think the hard drive crapped the bed?

you might have a virus or something on your hard drive or it corrupted itself. my friend had a similar problem where he turned off his computer and then windows would freeze immediately and not even make it to safe mode. it boggled me for awhile as i switched it onto different computers and tested each piece of hardware. by any chance what model is it and who made it? hope this helps. sounds like you might need to reformat it

*add* did try running the hard drive on other computers in the master setting or slave setting?

This post has been edited by hellsyphon: May 31, 2005 - 10:20 PM

Its an EMachine, and we cant reformat is since important info is on the HD. Plus we cant even get too the point of reformat.

problem 1... its a emachines, you get what you pay for with those.


open up the case, and power the system up. do all the fans come on? do you hear the all ok beep the motherboard sends out right after you press the power button?

Also, when you get the the option to boot into safe mode does it even attempt to load into safe mode if you select it?

Normally when booting into safe mode you'll see all the files its attempting to load....whichever file it stops on usually means its corrupted.

There also should have been more to your error other than 'Disk Error' if you can supply the whole error it might help.

you cant just plug any hd into any machine, the windows on that hd is setup for that machine in most cases it will not work with other configurations (motherboard, etc) so I would not assume its the hard drive, does the emachine just not work, what does it do when you push the power button, (with the hd in it like normal) does it start up, what does it say if it does nothing you go problems, you best chance it to plug the hd into another machine as the 2nd drive then start that one up like normal and copy over what you want to keep, then start messing with the other computer so that way you dont have much to lose. If you have the windows xp cd start it up with that in and do an emergancy repair (if the computer start up)

More info is needed for me to help, and be very spacific...

if the hd has "crapped the bed" it will make a clicking sound when its powered on, however when its just starting to crap out this will only occure when your looking at things on the hd it will start to make a clicking sound and freeze up, in the early stages it will come back from the freeze and contine as normal, but that stage will not last....

This post has been edited by creis: Jun 1, 2005 - 2:26 AM

Step #1: Take the harddrive with important data and try to use it as a slave disk in another computer (and copy the important stuff out).

If that works, then fine. If not

Step #2: Buy a cheap ass "harddrive crapped all over itself"-device from some kind of electronic/gadget/computer store somewhere and connect the drive to that device. Then into one of your other computers and extract the data. Those devices can usually extract deleted data also. I have used it several times to get back e-mail and other files that got deleted by accident. I'm just not sure what it would be called in English.

Step #3: You should have gotten your data back at this step even if the harddrive is damaged or not. So get a new harddrive and put data back where it should be, and also make a permanent backup of all the important stuff. Then install the operative system of choice and you should be back on track.

Another option is taking the computer, or maybe even just the harddrive with data to a company nearby that do things like that. Extracting deleted data or fixing broken harddrives.

Sounds like a power surge.

My first computer was an emachines, best computer i have ever owned. IN the 5 years it was in my household it never froze up or had any hardware breaking. I wish i could say that for my dell. ( by the way, dont ever bye dell they are the biggest piles of **** and their tech support sucks)



but ne ways, start computer uip and go into safemode, that should work. If u cant do it try buying a new hard drive or borrowing a clean hard drive from someone and try starting up the computer with that in, and install windows if possible. If that works then u know ur hard drive is broken

This post has been edited by DamDirtyApes: Jun 1, 2005 - 8:51 PM

i dont even know why people our age buy brand name computers. i like to pick out all my parts and put it together myself.

same here I have never and will never buy a out-of-the-box computer, its so much better to buy the parts and build it, plus you get exacly what you want (its not like there hard to put together its all snap-in.)

Have you tried putting the hard drive back into your emachine and just stating it up? If you have the "recovery disk" or can get an XP disk you could try to run a disk check which is basically typing dskchk under the command line screen, it will scan your hard drive allocate and repair any bad sectors, if that doesn't do it try to run a repair of the OS. I work with computers all the time it's my job, in my case from the sounds of it that is what I would do, since you currently have an OS on that hard drive hooking it up as a slave is probably out of the question unless you want to manually gather all the files through the promt screen. Hard drives crash but they don't take a crap like that physically or you would hear a clicking or grinding noise, it's all software issues. Alright take these steps, put your hard drive back in, find a boot disk for that OS, make sure the computer is set to boot from CD Rom go through all the do you want to install steps and when you get to the partition screen (not the first time it comes up) you should have an option to repair the OS by pressing R, if that doesn't come up then re-try but repair the first time it comes up prior to pressing F8. After that it should be repairing itself.

If all else fails and you happen to have another harddrive lying around, put that 'extra' harddrive in without the original drive in at first. Start up the computer in DOS, format the harddrive, then install Windows on it. Install some antivirus software on the extra drive then turn the computer off. Put the main harddrive back in, but as the slave drive on the primary IDE channel (the extra drive being the primary master. Make sure the jumper settings on the harddrives are correct.). Start the computer back up, it should load (because it's not booting off the original harddrive, it would be booting off the 'new' drive.) then run all your antivirus software and hope it finds a bunch of stuff which will hopefully fix the problem. Then swap the harddrives so the original one is set as the primary master drive and start it up.

If it still doesn't work, put the extra drive back in as primary master and the original as the primary slave then start it back up and copy off all the important data to the extra drive. Then take the extra drive out, format the original drive, install windows, put the extra drive back in as the primary slave, then copy your important files back. Sorry if that's confusing... Hope you get it working again!

its the best and only way, good man lagos

can you get to bios? any error messages?