Hard drive not working?

Hi! I'm n00baliscious

Anywho, there a problem with my brothers computer. Here it is -

Its a Compaq.. when its turned on it will show the normal compaq logo like it alway does, but then it will just go to a blank screen and not load the OS.

The thing is, he said there was a surge of electricity that may have caused it.

My guesses :
1) IDE cable went bad
2) The surge fried the hard drive (is this possible?)

Of course I'm no expert so any opinion would help. Thanks!

 

Odds are pretty good that it's not either of those. If it was caused by a power surge it would be the power supply itself or the motherboard that would go bad. It wouldn't be the IDE cable or anything to do with the HD at all. A computer should work just fine without an HD installed in it at all. So even if the HD was bad it wouldn't cause it to display a black screen. It would just display a message about not having any boot devices.

If you're fairly certain it's the power surge that caused the problems, your best bet is to check the power supply. Usally the best way to do this, is to simply plug it into another computer and see if it works. Alternativly you can use a multimeter if you have one.

 

I doubt it would be the power supply.

He says it gets to the "Compaq logo" but then goes blank which suggests it's powering up, but not booting.

 

Yeah, I know, of course quite often even broken/damaged power supplies manage to post. Then crash immediatly after because more power is required and they can't provide it.

The errors pretty general really. It could be the motherboard, the power supply, the cpu, or the ram. Everything else is fine. Or at the very least it isn't causing this problem. The other pieces could be broken, but they arn't related to this error.

 

Ah well thanks. I guess I'll do some experimenting to figure out whats wrong

 

Well i think you should just reinstall windows or repair it
im sure that will solve you're problem

 

listen to this now. i hooked the drive up to my computer as a slave and it works find when im loaded up on my hard drive. i can get into all the files on his drive. but when i make it the primary drive it wont load the os. it just goes to a blank screen. so theres something wrong with windows. is there anything i can do, or should i just reinstall windows? :\

 

Best thing to do would be to hook it up to your computer, save all the necessary data, then reinstall Windows. Clean and fairly easy.

 

UPDATE: I did a windows repair and now it can boot..

THE PROBLEM: I can't access c:\documents and settings\(user)

it says access is denied. When I go to properties of the folder is says its empty...

Is there any way I can access this folder?

(Note- after doing the repair, windows made me make a new account, its not recognizing this old account, so i cant logon it)

 

Try this to get get into your files and back them up and then reformat your hard drive and then install windows.

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP?

 

THANK YOU!! worked like a charm!!!

 

Glad to help