System has XP Pro. Worked fine and suddenly couldn't find the hard drive. Bad sectors , major hard drive failure, or master boot record virus were possibilities in my mind. I took a known hard drive, installed that and found it was also unreadable to the system. I can get into the BIOS and there it sees either hard drive. Does this indicate a bad motherboard? All fans seems to be working, and I can get to the A drive or cd rom. How should I proceed from here or do I just need to buy the grand kids a new system? :confused:

Hi Kenner,
Download the harddrive manufacturer's diagnostics and test the drive. If it is ok, then you may have a boot sector virus or other malady and possibly a corrupted os.

Getting into the A: drive and cd-rom means your mobo processor and RAM are more than likely ok. See what the diagnostics say first, then well go from there.

When I have trouble shooting an emachine, I try moving a little closer or making sure my sights are properly ranged. Breathe slowly, empty your lungs, and slowly but smoothly squeeze the trigger. :eek: :D

Sounds like the IDE channel (I'm assuming it's an IDE drive) on the motherboard might have failed. I'd get the manufacturer's diagnostics. If the diagnostics don't see the disk, try moving it to a different channel.

Hi, FTT. I'm running a little slow today...

pentachris,

I love it man. Reminds me of what I say about my ex-wife. I miss my ex, but my aim's getting better. :D

I have a diag. disk from my WD 40G. Would it work on the 120? Will it leave the data intact?

If the 120 is a WD, then sure, it will work and leave the data intact.

I tried the WD diag program in the E machine and in a backup pc after attempting to get it to see the suspect hard drive. The backup pc locks up using the WD software. I don't think it would make sense to buy a new hard drive for the E machine when it can't see a known hard drive. Must be a glitch in that E machine. Odd that everything but the IDE controllers work with hard drives attached. Will buy a new cheapie system but would like to settle my curiosity as to why the hard drives are invisible, unworkable in the E machine. The E machine had XP on it and the test drive was formatted to use WIN 98Se. That shouldn't make a difference.

Hi,

As they were saying, sometimes the simplest thing causes problem where we don't look. Have you checked your IDE cable yet? While you are at it just go ahead and change your harddrive to IDE2 (I mean the other channel).