Hi friend has just given me his PC to look at as its broken and i mentioned that i had an interest in fixing dead machines.

The machine is a fairly new packard bell machine with a 3.06ghz P4 processor. It will not load past the packard bell bios splash screen. On further inspection it appears that the reason for this is because it will not recognise the HDD and is trying to boot from the DVDRW drive. I cant figure out why this would be? i have checked all the connections and even tried removing the drive and plugging it into another machine - firstly as a slave then master, and then as an external drive using a USB IDE adapter i have.. but the drive simply is not recognised?

Im wondering why this would be? the drive isnt that old so i cant imagine that it has died but i dont know what else could be causing the problem? is it possible that a virus could have done this?

they sure can !

yes it is ,what you need to try is plugging another hdd into his computer to see if it will see it !

thanks for the advice.. ive plugged another known good drive in and it is recognised as a master IDE. This is an old spare drive i had so i thought id format and try a clean install of windows XP onto it, then try booting from that.. however for some reason it wont let me boot from the cd drive to install windows.. does this sound like the work of a virus? if so where should i go from here? as im fresh out of ideas!

You haven't said whether or not you told the BIOS to boot from CD.

@Suspishio..nice avatar..

hi bill, do as what Suspishio told you...go to setup BIOS and make sure it's configured to boot from CD..

hi yes i did set it to boot from the cd in the bios.. and when i restart after the bios splash screen the cd drive does start to spin and sound like its reading the disc but then the screen switches off to standby?? very frustrating! not sure where to go from here??

computer repair shop!

Really? So there's not much else I can do then? I'd rather have a go myself than pay someone even it means having to rebuild the machine although surely it won't come to that! Or will it? I've never come across anything quite like this one to be honest so any advice would be much appreciated

First of all put a new hard drive in the machine, then set the bios back to default or optimal settings, go in and set your boot order to CD then HDD. I have bought brand new HDD's that went out in a day so it is very likely that that HDD is bad. Put your OS disk in the CD and reboot it should work. If that does not work pull the bios cmos jumper or remove the cmos battery for about 30sec to 1min and try again. The only other thing I could tell you to do after that is bring it to me to fix.

Thanks for your advice.. any reason why a brand new drive though? as i have a spare drive which i know is fine and when i plug into this machine it is recognised as master ide. ill just need to format it i didnt think to remove the cmos battery but i guess that could work...