Hardware problem?

[Mig$y]

Hi guys,

I'm posting this on behalf of a friend whose computer is close to the grave.

Quote:
Whilst installing Sky Broadband the other day before it connected to Sky it offered me a months free McAfee with virus scan... blah blah. When I did the virus scan it popped up with 5 viruses and lots of malware/spyware etc.

I cleaned them via McAfee but decided to do a fresh install of the OS (XP Home) via a recovery disk. I got through disk one but then found out I didn't have a recovery disk two. I exited out and the computer did not boot up, it said it had some kind of read error. It was late so I left it till the next day and the computer although it sounded like it was booting up only had a black screen and the power light just kept flashing. I could not eject the CD from the drawer.

I popped down to see him tonight and it pretty much does what he says. I did open it up and the CD had shattered inside the drawer. I managed to remove all the broken pieces of CD but it still does nothing appears on the screen and the CD drawer doesn't open.

He's left me in charge of fixing it but where to begin??..... It's an old 2.2 Celeron Emachines POS and I'm just tempted to tell him to chuck it and buy something decent.

Ideas welcome.

thanks

Mig$y

[vw56german]

Could it possibly be booted from a different hard drive that has an intact operating system? Or are the processor and OS tied together by some type of serial number validation?

[Chewy]

put another drive in(optical) and using a generic home install cd see if it will take his number? order new disks? pitch the computer?

[SKD_Tech]

Either find another home CD or get another CD from Emachines (10-20 bucks I believe) and go that route.

[Mig$y]

Mobo or chip has had it.......

Thanks for the suggestions.

Good old emachines.

[lfcrule1972]

So you chucked it then mate ?