wont boot

i think my hard drive might be dead just wondering if I can get it to work for my nephews already bought a new one. here is the situation setting watching tv all the sudden computer in the room shuts down and tries to re-boot and does it over and over gets to the windows xp loading screen then shuts back down and starts over again cant get past that point. brought it to class and try kill disk recovery disk and many other options to try to just get it to run. shows that it is on the computer when trying to boot, when we run a disk then it cant find the hard drive. its a quantum fireball cx 13.6 at. we have tried other hd on this motherboard and worked and have tried this hd on another board and still the same problem. wondering if there are any setup disks to get for it and if that would even work please give me some direction on this. thanks Joe

 

Have you tried connecting it as a slave to another computer to see if Windows will see it in disk management ?

 

we are actually tring that now is there a certain way to hook up the two drives or does it matter which way there hooked up on the ribbon middle plug end plug. it seems to be stuck on the xp pro loading screen or is just taking a while but not rebooting like before. when we stuck the xp disk in to repair or load thats when it says it cant find hard drive to.

 

Microsoft help solutions, and how to
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/search.aspx?=&qu=startup+repair+XP

 

It does not matter which connection the second hard drive is connected to - but just be sure that the jumper on the back of the hard drive you want to check is in the slave position- most hard drives have a little diagram on the top of the drive to tell you where to put the jumper.
If you get it connected, and Windows cannot see it, come back to us.

 

If the hard drive is clicking, it might have failed.
But, If The Bios sees it , it is sometimes possible to get it back, even if only to get data off.
If the Bios does not see it, it is probably not spinning up (dead)
If nothing else gets it to work - check Microsoft links, that I gave, then if you need some important data off badly you will be best to have it done by a data recovery company.
If you want to read it it is possible to download software tools, or , download knoppix live cd (it is in iso form) and an iso reading/writing toll, and save the knoppix live cd to a cd.
With this cd, you insert into the working computer, and you can see into the second hard drive, if it is still working at all, and copy the data you want over to the working drive, or , to a usb flash drive.

 

Knoppix live cd --- freeware.
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
download from
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirr...rorservice.org/sites/ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/
courtesy of University of Kent U.K

 

If your present writing software has not got iso burning capabilities - this is a good free one that does it all. CDBurnerXP 4.0.015.277
http://majorgeeks.com/download4242.html

 

If no software will read anything on it...............................
You can try the freezer trick, overnight.
Put it in an antistatic bag, and seal it. Then put it in the freezer overnight, and when trying again, try it before it gets to room temperature, and very occasionallty, it will spin up after that - but Rarely- a previous poster did manage to get it to run doing that , a few weeks ago.
This very crude sounding remedy has been given by a lot of experts - I will be honest, I never got lucky using it.
ONLY DO THIS IF YOU WANT TO TAKE THE RISK, AS IF IT DOES NOT WORK, YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL 99% CERTAIN TO BE DONE FOR.