A couple of days ago the motherboard & power supply died in an eMachines T2542. The HDD and memory were removed from the PC and check out in an identical unit that we had. Both HDD and memory worked fine in the identical machine. Since then, I have tried booting the HDD in three other non-emachines computers with no luck. Each time, the OS starts to boot, but then causes the machine to reset back to the post screen a few seconds after the boot process starts. I have tried normal booting, safe mode and even restoring the last good config with no luck. I assume that the problem is a bad driver but the reset happens so quickly that the machine hardly has time to load anything. Does emachines key the Windows on the HDD to a particular type of machine? Any other ideas would be appreciated. In the time it has taken to write this, I have seen the machine reboot 12 times.
Your not going to get that drive to boot on another mobo without doing a repair install of Windows. and you arent going to do that with any Emachine recovery disks either. because the emachine disk will more than likely refuse to do anything on a non emachine mobo and bios.
If you do have a Recovery disk with XP on it there is hope. you can make your own XP disk from the recovery disk. here is a guide.
