On Thu, 12 May 2011 17:21:39 -0400, "Charlie"
wrote:
There used to be groups where one could get a cogent answer about PCs
acting up.
I'll try here.
I have a friend with an E-Machines PC.
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.
Depending on what's wrong with the HD, you might be able to access the
other one or two partitions on the HD, though you can't access the XP
partition. But the other partitions are hidden, I think.
It would be the old HD that had the restore partition. I'm told in
the Dell group that this partition can be copied too, which is not
surprising, but I'm guessing you have to first unhide it. And you
can't do that with the Storage Management software in XP
afaik but you
can with 3rd-party software, like Partition Magic 8, Paragon free and
Easeus free Partition Manager, though the latter and maybe Paragon
will ruin a win98 partition if you try to change its size, even when
runnning under XP.
However all restore will do is put it back the way the factory shipped
it. Did it have special features that XP from MS doesn't have. If
Is this a laptop that requires special drivers. Can you dl them from
emachine?
If it has nothing special and you can get the drivers, you can use a
retail XP CD but use the Product Key from this computer.
But better yet, see Michael Terrell's first post. I think if you use
an emachine DVD, you don't need to know the product key. At least I
think that is true for Dell, so I'm guessing it's the same.
I haven't read the rest.
I checked that my setup was ok using other drives that were on hand.
So I had her get a replacement HD. Two restore disks are on hand so I
charged ahead feeling that all would be well.
Phoenix BIOS is set to start from the CD first and the HD next.
But when trying to start the recovery from the CD. there are two choices.
1) restore the system.
or
2) start from the CD
Choice 1 warns that all data will be lost. That's ok. It's a new HD
So I select Y go do it and the system hangs
Trying choice 2 brings an unexpected result. The system tries to start from
a nonexistent A drive.
This box has no A drive. Looking through the setup panels show no mention of
a floppy drive.
What now?
Charlie