eMachines restore failed... need help!

[Tmagic650]

Yes Tedster,
good going on the necktie party! I knew your location was real... who would make that one up??

"Ghost does cloning in a roundabout way. It first creates image files and then do clone, you reverse the process. It is rather slow. Apricon EZ gig is a much better program it does a direct clone. I am sure there are others."

I have used Ghost a few times, but with Emachines older Ghost restore discs, I could never get a complete restore accomplished. Norton 360 a new offering from Symantec, will perform automatic backups and they are easily restored. I have a 100GB USB external Seagate that I use as the backup drive. Seagates DiskWizard will clone most boot drives exactly. I have done this many times as I repair a lot of older computer systems. Drives with XP on them are no exception to this

 

[cubecompMTDX]

The eMachine discs will work on a mobo with similar hardware

I tried this out on my spare PC which has an Asus P4B533-VM board. The CDs copied the files, and everything went smoothly. What's funny is that my spare PC now thinks it's an Emachine W2888. The Motherboard has similar hardware to the Intel D845GVSR which is in the W2888. So If your board has similar H/W (e.g. chipset, audio, etc.) try your CDs out.

 

[cubecompMTDX]

How to fix the original issue back a few miles ago at the beginning of the thread.

If the system does not have a telephone modem installed, install one. That should clear up the problem. If there's already a modem installed, the problem lies somewhere else in the networking hardware area. There might be a missing driver to a particular networking component. The easiest way to restore the system is to get an XP install CD by itself, without a new COA key, format the hard drive with NTFS (not quick), this is in the windows setup area, proceed with installation, use the COA key on the back of the computer when installing. When the install is completed, go into windows, check the device manager for unknown devices (Start > (right-click) My Computer, select properties... select hardware tab, click device manager. If needed, install drivers, which will usually be located on one of the Emachine restore discs, usually #3. Insert the disc, go to my computer, right-click the CD drive icon that the disc is in, select Explore. Then go into the Drivers folder, there you should see folders to the devices on the system, open these folders, somewhere, there should be a setup file (like a software installation file) Once you get the drivers installed, activate windows over the internet, and you will have a true "clean install of XP