Hard drive / PC Stuck in Start-up Loop

JasonLVC

Came back from holiday to find my old PC didn't want to start up at all. Checked everything, fuse, cables, etc. I'm not entirely sure why as it was working fine before I went on holiday.

My PC is an old emachines 3220 Intel Celron running XP. So rather than mess about buying new PSU's, I have two other old PC machines in the garage so I thought I could put my hard drive (IDE) from my emachines into one of the other two machines (a HP running XP and an IBM running XP).

Having no-end of troubles. Both machines don't seem to recognise my hard drive at all. Both systems boot up into safe mode and no matter which option I choose (last safe config, safe mode to command, etc) the system just keeps rebooting into a loop.

I've added my old drive as a slave to the spare PC's system as I just want to pull a few files off the drive and then I'll just buy a new PC - but all the new PC's I've seen have SATA drives not IDE connections...I know I can get a converter cable and may go down that route anyway...but I'm annoyed that I cannot get a HDD to either boot up or be recognised by another similar PC system.

I'm guessing this is either a BIOS issue or a jumper setting on the HDD - so any advice would be appreciated folks.

Thanks.

Browntoa

have you got an XP cd you can use to boot it and then run Chkdsk ??

JasonLVC

Thanks.

I have a legit copy of XP for the PC that no longer works but don't have an XP disc for the two 'spare' machines.

I assume it is okay to use the XP disc in other machines (albeit temporarily) in order to effect a repair/start-up.

Come to think of it, when I do buy a new machine it'll have Vista on it, so I guess I can use my old XP disc to install to the new machine .

spakkker

Most likely you will have to change the jumper setting on hdd.
You should be able to install your xp onto one of your other hdds installed in your main pc.