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?

[darksecret]

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.