First - thanks to the mods in advance as I've been reading the threads on part of my current problem (and with a prev problem; I lost my prev registration) and have found your help to others invaluable to my problem so didn't need to repost.
Second - here is what happened to my current machine: a few-years old emachines. This will be long, but I don't want to leave anything out if possible so you are able to see where I am.
PC suddenly up & stopped working. I was using it - left for 20-30 mins - came back to the sound of a "cricket on LSD" and knew my MB was having problems: no display besides (i think, it's been about 10 days) a memory dump completed, so I went to restart and it became DOA. No power, no lights, nada.
Checked power supply thinking fan not working = CPU overheated (the thermal seal disappeared between the CPU and heatsink/fan setup). I did "backrig" the main ATX power supply (250W) to test it - which made the CPU fan spin merrily UNTIL I undid the wiring and put it back and smoke poured out of the main power supply/fan. Obviously unplugged it right away.
So I bought a NEW CPU and a NEW motherboard, after speaking to emachines to make sure this was possible. The tech said yes - but have a pro do it and you have to buy the exact same MB and CPU. But he didn't have the specifications for unknown reasons.
So I bought the following new:
Antec 350W SmartPower 2.0 ATX power supply
GIGABYTE Intel 865G (GA-8I865GME-775-RH) motherboard
Intel Celeron D 351 LGA775 3.2 GHz processor
Installed them all - everything turns on - except once past the BIOS screen (which DID recognize the HDD), I end up in the screen where it tells you Windows didn't load correctly, and to choose your startup option.
I tried all of them. Safemode, safemode with cmd prompt, last known good config, and normal. No matter what I tried it would restart until I was stuck in a restart loop. Even when I didn't choose anything while trying to look up the problem on other PC it would restart. I researched the problem and it said I had to update my BIOS on the HDD for the new MB, but.... you can't do that if you can't boot from a CD (for the MB install) that says you have no room to backup the files on the HD (120GB with PLENTY of room avail) first.
I booted from the XP CD and ran recovery console. It said the drive had one or more unrecoverable problems. even running chkdsk /r was a problem - it would get up to 65% or so then inexplicably drop back to 50% and get stuck.
And trying another fix I've seen on the forum (act like you are running a new install and then it will give you an "R" for repair option) didn't work, because no "R" appeared - it acted like it was a brand new disk with nothing on it.
Well lucky me had an extra never-used (too busy+lazy, plus scared to ruin it HAH!) hard drive stored away: Seagate 200GB Ultra ATA/100 (ST3200822A).
I installed that one as master with bad drive as slave, and they were both recognized in BIOS. Ran Seagate's DiskUtility install on new HDD, then ran XP install CD on new HDD. Got into a working OS and opened my computer only to find that when I clicked on the (bad) drive icon that DID show up, I could not access it. I've since disconnected it because everytime I had to restart due to XP service packs (trying to get large disk support working), it would try to run CHKDSK AGAIN on the bad drive over & over - with no success ("2nd NTFS boot sector is unwriteable).
So I've spoken to a local data recovery company ($239), but will first try one (or more) of the at-home data recovery programs: Stellar Phoenix and GetDataBack (runtime).
FINALLY: Here's my question:
HOW did my HDD become corrupt/unreadable from an overheating CPU/MB/fan?
Or is this as someone else wrote on an emachines group forum: caused by my installing a different MB on the PC and the old HDD still having the old MB settings/files so my old HDD acts insane & just stops working, BUT all the files are there still? Now that the old HDD is set up as slave, and I still can't access anything on it normally, I'm unsure if using one of the data recovery programs will harm the HDD because - after all, I don't know what happened to begin with to cause the "corruption".
I hope you've been able to follow all this and understand what I am dealing with so can possibly advise me on my next logical step. It makes so little sense to me at this point, I'm not optimistic.
Thank you in advance.
Mrs Koz