catastrophic system failure!

Here's what happened. I had a freind who's computer crashed dead. I was going to try to salvage her hard drive. I took the hard drive out of one of my computers and installed hers. The HD wouldn't boot, so I inserted a Windows XP Home recovery disc to try to do a repair on the OS. It went thru the copy files bit and the auto reboot then the windows startup screen came up (the one with the Windows XP logo and the little bar scroling under it) after a couple seconds it flased a blue screen of death for a split second and went into a reboot. The same thing happened again at the reboot so I figured the HD was toast. I took the HD out and put mine back in. The computer started but I got nothing on the monitor,no bios,no splash screen,nothing not even a blinking curser. I unpluged it, rechecked the connections on the HD and monitor, pluged it back in and now it's totally dead no power at all. It acts like it's not plugged in. Did I fry the mobo? short the PSU? I don't really know where I should start. Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

The system is:
ASUS K8V SE Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
1.5 Gig RAM
GeForce MX4000

 

If I've understood you right, you tried to boot into Windows XP on a machine other than the one that instance of XP was installed on. That's generally not a good idea -- Windows doesn't like it when you change the hardware under it; change too much of the hardware all at once, and... well, let's just say "your mileage may vary".

It may not have been the hard drive that got toasted. The hardware changes under that installation of XP may have crashed that installation. Running the recovery disk would likely have resulted in Windows trying to discard the drivers for the machine it was originally installed on, and replacing those with the appropriate drivers for your machine.

Usually, it's pretty hard to damage the hardware just by using the software, even with inappropriate settings in the software. However, if some component was on the verge of failing, the thrashing around while your machine tried to digest your friend's WinXP installation might have tipped something over the edge.

If your system is now behaving as if it's not plugged in, I'd check the power supply unit first. See if you can get a temporary replacement -- but keep in mind that if your motherboard died, it could have taken the PSU with it and might do the same to the replacement. It's unlikely, but definitely not impossible.

Another test: open the case, and watch the fans when you fire up. If there's no life at all, your PSU remains your prime suspect. If the fans start spinning, then shut down within a second or two, look for a short somewhere, and consider the possibility that the motherboard or CPU has died. Some PSUs have protection circuitry that shuts them down if any rail tries to draw too much current.

If the latter is the case, disconnect all peripherals (video card, hard drives, optical drives, floppy drive, modem, network card, etc.). Remove all but one stick of RAM. (Don't disconnect the CPU fan, though.) See if the machine shows any signs of life with most of the load removed. If it comes back to life, your PSU is no longer your prime suspect, but it isn't exonerated yet. Reconnect the peripherals you disconnected one at a time, testing after each reconnection. The peripheral you last connected when the machine refuses to restart is your prime suspect.

 

I should mention that My system had Win XP Pro and my friend's hard drive that I swapped in had Win XP Home. All the hardware in my system (mobo,CPU,Graphics card,Hard drive and PSU is about a year and a half old,
I put the system together in Oct 05.

 

You have disturbed something else in the process of swopping hard drives, perhaps without realising it.
Have a good look at at the works. could the Motherboard battery have come loose?
Did you push cables out of the way and loosen connectors, in particular the extra 4 pin 'Molex' from the power supply? Oft times one can take a cable out of the way and forget to put it back.
Strip the pc down to the bare minimum video out, keyboard, mouse, no other cards in slots. A good pc should boot through bios to the 'insert operating system disk' message like this.

let us know how you get on and we will help save your friends data.

Studio T

 

Problem solved. OK I guess I jumped the gun on this one. I started stripping the system down and found the big 20 pin connector to the mobo loose, reseated it and all is well again. The systed (with my hadr drive back in it ) booted right up, I got the black "Windows was not shut down properly..." screen, which I would kinda expect when the HD was unplugged, I just hit 'Start Windows Normaly' and she came right up-everything fine. As for the friend's computer she's gonna buy a new PC and we'll hook her old HD up as a slave a copy her picture/documents etc. Thanks for all the replys, I did learn my lesson about swaping hard drive from on PC to another.

 

Glad it worked out OK. Post again sometime.


Studio T logging off