Have i killed my friends pc...

Hi,
Have i killed my friends Pc. My friend always gets me to help her with her pc, she only uses it for emails, internet and mahjong! Well she asked me to connect camera and download pics of new granddaughter. When i got there both DVD drives were not showing in device mgr and my computer. They usually work fine, she listened to music night before. Pc was a bit slow (only a athlon 1.6, gig ram, geforce mx440etc running xp) Not any good for me as l play games but perfect for her. WELL... i updated spybot as i know she never does stuff like that. Took out a 6 spyware things (4 in registry). Computer acting dodgy so i restsrt. PC will not boot, wasn't sure sequence to boot, i went in to bios, hd boot first, no dvd drives showing, get pc to boot. Hooray working iffy but working. I tell her i will collect after work tomorrow to see why dvd drives aren't working.
Bring it home yesterday evening, my husband disconnects drives puts in one of ours, Now showing in device mgr etc, rebot Pc wont boot..... eventually get it to swallow xp disc and think wipe it down, It has been doing black screens, physical dumps.... Wipe it down , install xp, put on service pack 2, both her dvd drives were now working, pc really acting dodgy, rebot put on avg and it restarts and now i cant get it to open up?? Just getting to biostar logo, can't get into bios, don't know what to do?

Is it the motherboard? or is it the HD? Have i killed it?
Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks
Joanna:cry

 

Check all the cable connections and recheck them (with the power off).

You should be able to access the bios with all the drives disconnected.
It should then boot to the notice
insert operating system disk or somesuch.
Then reboot
F2 or Del or whatever at boot to get into the bios and choose autodetect hard drives
save changes and exit.

Only add back the ones you need until you have it running properly.

 

Thanks i will try later and then get back to you.. Do you think i have killed it?

 

Do you mean for me to disconnect both dvd drives, graphics card and HD? Would i need hd to get it working?

 

A working pc should boot to the bios and a query screen asking for an operating system, if it has not floppy, zip, CD/DVD or hard drives connected.
Do not disconnect the graphics.
I mean physical disconnection, not disabling.

This will prove that the motherboard/graphics etc is working.

Once you have done this add a CD and Hard drive and do the autodetect routine.

 

I tried the cable checking.... and it booted up. I am wondering whether the cable to the disk drives is a bit dodgy as, sometimes it sees no disk drives, sometimes one and sometimes two. I probably irritated it as when i put xp on i asked it to boot from cd drive, and then cd drive stopped working. Is this possible? an iffy cable could cause those problems? I am continuing to put avg on etc. I will get my husband to change dvd drive cable when he comes in. I am too staticy, even with a static band! Please let me know what you think and any warning signs i would get if it is motherboard?
Thank you for all your help studiot.

 

Judging from the 1.6 Athlon I would guess the pc has the flat ribbon data cables.
There are two sorts of these, best identified by the ribs as coarse and fine; 40 and 80 respectively.

You need the 80 rib fine cable for hard drives and 40 for DVD. The fine is also OK for DVD.

Also the windows hard drive cable should be plugged into the socket marked IDE 0 if the second is marked IDE 1 and
IDE 1 if the second is marked IDE2.

 

Thank you for all your help.