problem with friends pc .. help pls

A

Angelus

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hiya

my friend and i were trying to assist his mom in cleaning up her "c" drive that she brought with her

her "c" was putinto his system and it was started up with his "c" still connected and the system started up but started with her "c" rather then his "c" , his "c" is a sata and hers is a ide .... thought the sata found be master but didnt turn out that way.

anyway in windows the system started detecting all new hardware but the mouse was not responding and also keyboard shortcuts werent responding so we did a hard shutdown and then restarted the system but then the sytem would not start up where there was no startup screen at all and also the screen would not come out of standby mode and if the screen was powered of and then on it would say that there was no signal his graphics is on board.

i'm thinking perhaps maybe with both "c" drive connected at the same time maybe the boot sequence is messed up or maybe the onboard vga has failed

his mb is a http://www.msi.com/product/mb/G41M-P26.html

could anyone perhaps shead some light on what may of happened ?
 
You need to set the IDE to slave using the jumpers. Also set the boot order in either BIOS or when booting up (usually F12)

What Windows is this?
 
windows xp ... but when we start it there is no boot screen at all the ones with all the dos type writing eh

we also tried to boot up with just one drive connected at a time that also didnt do anything the machine starts up and then nothing also there arent any warning beeps either
 
Sounds like you may have dislodged some memory. No memory = will not start and no display on the screen. Take it out and reseat it (gently)

Set the BIOS to load factory defaults and just connect the SATA drive. A better bet with trying to connect another HDD is to use a IDE to USB adaptor. Then you can plug it in when the first PC is going
 
It won't work trying boot into Windows using her drive as the primary drive in another machine that her C drive Windows wasn't installed on.
Your friend's C drive was probably changed to another available drive letter by the OS and hers being the primary C. The OS is smart enough not to have two Cs.

You need to change the boot order.
Just after restarting the machine go into the BIOS by pressing F12/DEL and see if the BIOS recognizes both drives. Then change the boot order to put the IDE first.

On 2nd thought can't you rather put her C drive into an external enclosure and clean it up that way? Your asking for something to break if you don't know what you are doing.
 
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my word what a mission lol thanks for the replies

i reseated the memory and then booted up with just his c connected and it worked
then we turned it off and added his other drives that he had and then restarted the machine and then it did it again, so then we turned off and reseated the mem again and still nothing

so then we disconnected the other drives the one is a IDE and then restarted again and then it worked

it seems to be that there is something up with the IDE drive when it is connected

but yes i have a ide enclosure and we going to rather put the hdd into that
 
Angelus said:
it seems to be that there is something up with the IDE drive when it is connected
Click to expand...

Seeing you are running multiple IDE drives check the master/slave configuration is they are on the same IDE port.
 
we got it started with out the extra hdd but now we left it on right i mean the system running and the system just turns itself off like it just die's , just so wiered everything was fine until we started adding the hard drives and now its all messed up ... just trying to get the sys to run stable again now ... :(

i checked the system event viewer and found this too

"Service Control Manager Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the Roxio Hard Drive Watcher 9 service to connect"
 
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No personal offense intended, but you are doing more damage than good.

Take it to someone who knows what they are doing. If I start typing out what you should and shouldn't do would take the whole day to and fro. The same with the other members on here. You clearly lack the know-how and experience to fix this with guided advice.
 
Besides the above advice you could also try this,

Backup all data and mail folders on the PC. Format the system drive and reinstall windows.

Probably not what you want to hear but should be easier than fixing it.

Where in Durban are you located?
 
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