PC Problem ( techs needed big time) Options

[prompt]

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?

[creis]

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