This is basically a rant, but someone might learn something.
My emachines t2692 that I bought the day after thanksgiving 2003 blew its power supply and motherboard. Net wisdom indicates that this whole series blows up in three years. It's stock except a DVD burner, firewire card, tv tuner, and second hard drive. Ok maybe not stock. For the snobs who think I stressed out the 250 watt power supply, my kill-a-watt meter shows it drew only 120 watts during heavy thinking. Perhaps it's made with the cheapest capacitors available, who knows, but if you have an emachines, back your stuff up. I back up once every other year
but had backed up to CDROM 3 days before it blew up.
I keep parts computers around and pulled a 350 watt ps that bolted up perfectly but it still wouldn't boot or even get to the bios so I ordered a new old stock (2004) motherboard from ebay. HP/Compaq, it took my celeron processor and memory so I'm happy, and since it's new it's capacitors haven't dried out yet. Put it in and it would get to BIOS and stop. Wouldn't say 'no operating sytem' or anything just stop. I had been hoping, like win95 or win98, it'd boot in safe mode, complain a lot, but let me fix the drivers.
Of two equal sized and speeded hard drives in there, one had been a video scratch disk and could stand reformatting and being made master, so I switched them.
Emachines ships with restore CDROMS that are useless to browse... just have to let them build their ghosts and reboot. The computer kept rebooting 1/10 of the way into windows, before safe mode prompt or splash screen. In hindsight I could have formatted the drive FAT32 (temporarily even), let the disks rip, and then gone in with a dos boot, browsed to the i386 folder, and ran WINNT.exe for a proper setup.
Got distracted by linux but it proved the 'puter would run, and run pretty well. Was hoping the linux boot loader would see windows on the other drive and give it the kick in the pants it needed to go... thinking master boot record corruption... no go.
Various dos bootdisk solutions were stymied by the NTFS I had formatted with. Found something at http://nu2.nu/pebuilder that let me in. Linux (mandrake 9.2, had it laying around) could get into NTFS and read files and either ftp them somewhere or burn them to CD-ROM... but I had just backed stuff up. Lesson: Linux will get your data. I then tried a CD-ROM only distro called KNOPPIX that also worked great and could get my data.
I had given up on my emachines restore disk, as well as getting a "real" XP disk from them or microsoft. "They" would not support a computer that they hadn't built, and MS says go to OEM for OEM licensed XP support. I started looking around to borrow an XP SP1 disc that my valid license key sticker would work with. No dice, everyone had SP2, and I couldn't figure out ahead of time if the key would work... or if it would send alarm bells to MS headquarters.
Finally (if you've read this far) I found a site that described how one could build a "real" XP install disc from their restore disk. The i386 folder is basically the same as the CAB folder on 95 and 98. I even had this on my slave hard drive in the former windows folder! Went in there, ran WINNT, and got it done...
Lessons:
NTFS is hard to get into.
Back stuff up.
Remember your NT admin password (there are bootlevel cracks though)
Restore disks are junky garbage you may not absolutely need and probably don't want to use. Restore disks that don't restore are not the end of the world.
My emachines t2692 that I bought the day after thanksgiving 2003 blew its power supply and motherboard. Net wisdom indicates that this whole series blows up in three years. It's stock except a DVD burner, firewire card, tv tuner, and second hard drive. Ok maybe not stock. For the snobs who think I stressed out the 250 watt power supply, my kill-a-watt meter shows it drew only 120 watts during heavy thinking. Perhaps it's made with the cheapest capacitors available, who knows, but if you have an emachines, back your stuff up. I back up once every other year
I keep parts computers around and pulled a 350 watt ps that bolted up perfectly but it still wouldn't boot or even get to the bios so I ordered a new old stock (2004) motherboard from ebay. HP/Compaq, it took my celeron processor and memory so I'm happy, and since it's new it's capacitors haven't dried out yet. Put it in and it would get to BIOS and stop. Wouldn't say 'no operating sytem' or anything just stop. I had been hoping, like win95 or win98, it'd boot in safe mode, complain a lot, but let me fix the drivers.
Of two equal sized and speeded hard drives in there, one had been a video scratch disk and could stand reformatting and being made master, so I switched them.
Emachines ships with restore CDROMS that are useless to browse... just have to let them build their ghosts and reboot. The computer kept rebooting 1/10 of the way into windows, before safe mode prompt or splash screen. In hindsight I could have formatted the drive FAT32 (temporarily even), let the disks rip, and then gone in with a dos boot, browsed to the i386 folder, and ran WINNT.exe for a proper setup.
Got distracted by linux but it proved the 'puter would run, and run pretty well. Was hoping the linux boot loader would see windows on the other drive and give it the kick in the pants it needed to go... thinking master boot record corruption... no go.
Various dos bootdisk solutions were stymied by the NTFS I had formatted with. Found something at http://nu2.nu/pebuilder that let me in. Linux (mandrake 9.2, had it laying around) could get into NTFS and read files and either ftp them somewhere or burn them to CD-ROM... but I had just backed stuff up. Lesson: Linux will get your data. I then tried a CD-ROM only distro called KNOPPIX that also worked great and could get my data.
I had given up on my emachines restore disk, as well as getting a "real" XP disk from them or microsoft. "They" would not support a computer that they hadn't built, and MS says go to OEM for OEM licensed XP support. I started looking around to borrow an XP SP1 disc that my valid license key sticker would work with. No dice, everyone had SP2, and I couldn't figure out ahead of time if the key would work... or if it would send alarm bells to MS headquarters.
Finally (if you've read this far) I found a site that described how one could build a "real" XP install disc from their restore disk. The i386 folder is basically the same as the CAB folder on 95 and 98. I even had this on my slave hard drive in the former windows folder! Went in there, ran WINNT, and got it done...
Lessons:
NTFS is hard to get into.
Back stuff up.
Remember your NT admin password (there are bootlevel cracks though)
Restore disks are junky garbage you may not absolutely need and probably don't want to use. Restore disks that don't restore are not the end of the world.