My emachine keeps telling me that my hard drive is not working what can I do

The hard drive must still be working to get the pictures off. The best thing to do is remove the hard drive from the machine and use either an external USB type case to mount the drive into so you can use another computer to explore the drive or there is a tool that just plugs on to the drive with a USB cable and power supply built in that will serve the same purpose. You must get the appropriate type to match the drive type which could be either IDE or SATA. SATA drives use the small cable and IDE use the wide ribbon. If the hard drive is not working, you would have to get specialized and expensive company to retrieve the data from the drive.

Sounds like your hard drive may have developed bad sectors preventing your OS from working properly.Also you may need to install a fresh OS once the sectors are repaired but usually not.Hard Drive Regenerator is a good software for regenerating bad sectors,if they are repairable that is.Either way it sounds like a failed or failing hard drive.

Sounds like your Hard Disk Drive is Bad and you will have to replace it this link will tell you how to install a hard drive
http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/aspire-one-hdd.aspx

You need to set the second hard drive up as the "SLAVE". There is a small jumper on the end of the hard drive where the power cable and data cable plug in. There should be a diagram showing where the jumper is placed to make it the SLAVE.
As far as figuring out which is which (MASTER .vs SLAVE), the MASTER is the last drive on the cable.
I hope this makes sense...

Good Luck.

reinstall the os from scratch...

I’m happy to assist further over the phone at https://www.6ya.com/expert/norman_d2fa496dce30c65d

What kind of resources are you pulling on the pc everyday? For example are you doing heavy writing to the drive everyday such as video editing, ripping etc and how much air flow is your pc getting. If the case gets too hot or warm for long periods of time it can cause the hard drive to fail quickly. Lastly check your power supply male sure its pputting out the proper voltage to the computer specifially the connection to the hard drive. If its not stable the nit will cause your hard drive to fail.

Joe

Hi, there is a good possibility your hard drive has some bad sectors, I recommend downloading a utility that will check the state of the hard drive. http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=SeaTools&vgnextoid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

You will need to burn the ISO on a working computer, then boot from cd and run the long test. If there is bad sectors the hard dive test will fail, then hard drive would need to be replaced. Good luck!

it probably says insert suitable boot device. If you are trying to boot from a cd go into the bios and set the boot device priority to CD as priority. If hard drive then set hard disk to the top.

Psu is a Power Supply issue but the black screen with a blinking white line is not.
The blinking white line can mean there is no instructions to tell the Computer to boot up. Which could be possibly the system battery (cmos) or Hard Drive.
I would narrow those 3 things down first.

either unscrew in the back, and slide of side or unscrew and open side