Hard drive on an eMachine computer desktop has crashed. Computer won't boot. Is there anyway to get files off the crashed hard drive?

Here's a video on how I fixed my emachines boot problem. Almost anything can get in the way of your computer booting. Software, hard drive, RAM, motherboard, processor, etc. Below the video, I attached a link to a tip I made about computer crashes. Computer Crashes and Electrolytic Capacitors

If the hard drive failed you will first need to replace it with a working hard drive. One that is done, power on the computer with the recovery disc is the drive and enter setup. It should say something like press F9 or F10 for Setup. Look through the menus for "Boot Order", make sure your CD/DVD drive is above hard drive. Save the changes and reboot, you should get a message "Press any key to boot to disc" or something similar, do so, and follow the prompts to re-install windows.

First test is put new harddrive in and when it goes to boot press Delete,
for entry to Setup, make sure new hard drive is found in equipment.
System equipment, if so then Put Operating disk in CD drive and check
check boot list , Put CD drive first then save and let boot up. It will automatically load the operating system back in the new hard drive.

As far as your saved material in old hard drive. You can check hard drive on second hard drive cable or with a USB adapter connection to
see if able to boot hard drive up and view files. If it works then you can
drag material from one window the desktop (To drag material just put mouse on file and left click-hold down button and move to desktop it will
automatically copy file to desktop.)

Try safe mode and use system restore.

Technically, YES, the hard drive can be formatted as an external (with the appropriate equipment) on your laptop (if there are still files on it, you may even be able to extract them from it) but it still won't be bootable because it does not have an operating system on it.

That would be the part where you need the recovery disc. Windows setup programs from these boot discs already have the format utility so if there aren't any files to extract from the drive, you can skip to reinstalling Windows on the desktop and formatting it in the process.

Bottom line is that you need a Windows installation disc to make the hard drive bootable again, regardless of where you format it.

I'm sorry to say this but these are signs of your computer's hard drive crashing. Hard drives (from what I've been told by other experts) typically crash after about 4-6 years of intense use. That's why I always recommend people backing up their important files every year. This has happened to my laptop before, I've had the same symptoms.

Now what about your files?

Well if you're lucky, you can ask a Geek Squad rep. from Best Buy or anyone else with proper experience to try to salvage your hard drive. Anyway you'd have to buy a new hard drive and replace your crashed one.

Solution: Take your computer to an expert to help you recover your hard drive files and replace the hard drive.

Sounds like a Windows issue. Depending on how valuable it is to you to get your data off the drive, I would suggest buying a new hard drive (they are fairly cheap these days), installing Windows on that. Word of advice: Remove your old drive when doing the Windows install, so as not to accidentally select the hard drive your data is on. Once you have Windows installed, shut down your computer, remove the power cord, and install your old drive on a separate IDE channel or SATA connection. If your PC still tries to boot to the old drive, change the boot order in your PC's BIOS.

Pardon me, but NO! The statement, "two things are responsible for booting up computer RAM and Hard Drive" is simply not true.

A hard drive crash COULD cause the symptoms you describe, but that is more indicative of a virus infection. When you say the XP reinstallation disk would not start it exactly how did you use that disk? Attempt to use the repair console? Boot directly from the disk? Attempt reinstallation of the whole operating system? If you attempted reinstallation, do you also have the specific drivers for all of the components E-Machines used when they built your computer (you will need at least some of them.)

Post again with some more details about how you used the reinstallation disk.

boot your computer from a bootable cd then format the partition, then restore it, if the message is the same replace your hard drive.

Yes, with that beeping sound that you're hearing from your hard drive is a sign of a bad hard drive , that's also the reason why the computer wont even boot because the hard drive is already bad, the best thing that you can do here is to get a new hard drive..

Hope that helps..............