PC Problem ( techs needed big time) Options

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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?

[AMCMoe]

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!