a bios question

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Reflash the BIOS.

Bootable cd's emulate a floppy A: with boot software, so allow boot from A

Is there really data on the CD to restore the HD??? Some computers depend upon the restoration partition on the HD to retrieve the data necessary for restoration. In other words, the CD is simply a boot vehicle that will look to the HD for the restoration data it needs. Read the CD and see if it has several directories of data that could be what it needs.

Another question would be is the new HD partitioned and formatted? I ran the restoration DVD on a HP computer and it would not restore. It gave little reason for not doing so. What it needed was partitioning and formatting. One would have thought the restoration process would have been prepared to do that, but it was not.

My eMachines W3118 came with a restoration DVD for the factory installed XP home, which includes all the drivers.

Many computers that include disks, and all that don't have some way of creating a restore disk from the install partition or files.

It depends upon the manufacturer how insistant it is. One brand I saw would not let you do anything with the newly installed windows system until the burning of DVDs (install Windows, provided apps) was finished.

Another made you click "not now" every hour until you did.

Other's just gave you a one time notice, it was up to you to figure out how to do it if you canceled it.

One even included blank DVDs.

The one I am using now, and MSI Wind U100, included Hebrew Windows on the hard drive with an insistant option to burn disks and a set of English DVDs. Note that the computer did not have a DVD or optical drive of any kind.

Apple used to include installation DVDs of MacOS with all of their computers, including the MacBook Air line, which has no optical drive. Now they include a USB memory stick with it. I expect netbook manufacturers will do the same for Windows too.

Back to the original question, does the BIOS offer a boot menu, or a setup key?

With the boot menu, you can just choose the DVD drive, with a setup menu, which comes up after your press the key (eventually), you can change the boot order to include the DVD drive first.

BTW, did you try the A drive option? It might try to boot from the floppy and after giving up try the DVD.

Geoff.xsxc

Good God, man! An expert electronic tech that admits he has an eMachine w/XP home...WTF!

Who's better equipped to own one? It's like an auto mechanic owning a Fiat.

Your friend has my sympathies. You also have my sympathy for not supplying the model number.

Yeah, it's dead.

More sympathy. Make and model of replacement drive?

Are the restore disks for the unspecified model machine?

Make sure the floppy disk is disabled in the BIOS.

I'm not sure what "start from the CD" actually is suppose to do. My guess(tm) is that it will boot the conventional Windoze install and possibly put you into the "recovery console", which you don't need. Use the "restore the system" option. It works.

You have no data to lose.

Not good. Does the BIOS see the new unspecified model hard disk drive? Did you enable the specific SATA port in the BIOS? This is the usual problem. For some insane reason, the authors of the various SATA BIOS's insist that the user enable/disable SATA devices, instead of probing for them, as in previous ATA BIOS's.

El Torito CD start specifies that the boot drive is A:. Is this a SATA CDROM drive, or an ATA drive?

You're assuming that the A: drive is always a floppy drive. It's not. It's just the first drive that the system finds.

Google perhaps?

How to Do an eMachines System Recovery

I have over 100 computers at home. I refurbish them and give them away for free. I used one eMachines Windows ME computer for ten years, and the original install of ME is still in use in another, later model? I needed ME to use an older flat bed scanner so I stuck the drive into a T1220 that was shipped with XP..

You do know that a lot of HP computers used the same motherboard, power supply and drives as eMachines that sold for half the price?

Or that Gateway and eMachines is owned by Acer?

I see a lot more dead Dell and HP computers than eMachines.

"You do know that a lot of HP computers used the same motherboard, power supply and drives as eMachines that sold for half the price?"

"Or that Gateway and eMachines is owned by Acer?"

And that makes them any good?

abi

em

eMachines that we evaluated could not withstand shock and vibration, so maybe their chief weaknesses were mechanical.

I've seen several new computers that told you to burn a restore DVD, and gave you one try. One had a bad drive, and others had corrupt files on the hard drive, which failed, in warranty.

No matter what the source, when you're making stuff to sell at a certain price point, corners have to be cut somewhere. Having a different brand for your low price line prevents loss of reputation for your standard products.

They were better built than most computers of their time. The worst were the custom built junk by small computer stores. The frame in the E-machines case was spot welded while the others had a couple screws or pop rivets, and shoved tabs into slots for a very flimsy case. Some were so weak that you could twist the chassis an inch out of line.

Vibration failures were often had drive related. That's why we used M-Disk drives in our products. They were first generation solid state hard drives.

Does trolling make you feel important? All three brands suffered from the substandard electrolytic problem, like just about every other brand. they got a bad reputation, but the others were "just tricked by component counterfeiters".

If you don't build your own rig, then you might as well buy a Dell. But not Acer(eMach,Gatewat) or HPaq! If that's trolling TFB!

Yawn... I owned a computer store for several years where I built a lot of computers, but you're still a troll.

Let's see. 'Charter' is your ISP, and you have to use Google groups with a screen name of 'Abi Normal', but you claim that you aren't a troll?

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You yawn, yet you reply...how stupid is that?! As far as Charter/GG goes... how smart would it be to use a newsreader at work. Yes, you do have all the answers.