On Thu, 12 May 2011 17:21:39 -0400, "Charlie"
wrote:

I have a friend with an E-Machines PC.

Your friend has my sympathies. You also have my sympathy for not
supplying the model number.

OS is XP home. It looked to me that the HD had failed.
I confirmed this to my mind by using a sata to usb adapter and found that
the old HD could not be accessed.
I checked that my setup was ok using other drives that were on hand.

Yeah, it's dead.

So I had her get a replacement HD.

More sympathy. Make and model of replacement drive?

Two restore disks are on hand so I
charged ahead feeling that all would be well.

Are the restore disks for the unspecified model machine?

Phoenix BIOS is set to start from the CD first and the HD next.

Make sure the floppy disk is disabled in the BIOS.

But when trying to start the recovery from the CD. there are two choices.
1) restore the system.
or
2) start from the CD

I'm not sure what "start from the CD" actually is suppose to do.
My guess(tm) is that it will boot the conventional Windoze install and
possibly put you into the "recovery console", which you don't need.
Use the "restore the system" option. It works.

Choice 1 warns that all data will be lost. That's ok. It's a new HD

You have no data to lose.

So I select Y go do it and the system hangs

Not good.
Does the BIOS see the new unspecified model hard disk drive?
Did you enable the specific SATA port in the BIOS? This is the usual
problem. For some insane reason, the authors of the various SATA
BIOS's insist that the user enable/disable SATA devices, instead of
probing for them, as in previous ATA BIOS's.

Trying choice 2 brings an unexpected result. The system tries to start from
a nonexistent A drive.

El Torito CD start specifies that the boot drive is A:.
Is this a SATA CDROM drive, or an ATA drive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_torito

This box has no A drive. Looking through the setup panels show no mention of
a floppy drive.

You're assuming that the A: drive is always a floppy drive. It's not.
It's just the first drive that the system finds.

What now?

Google perhaps?

How to Do an eMachines System Recovery
http://www.ehow.com/how_5969283_use-e_machine-recovery-cd.html

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558