A friend has a computer that's been working fine for a few years. Just a day ago, when she turned it on, it wouldn't recognize the hard drive or the CD drive, and right after "Verifying DMI pool", it said "Boot from CD:_" and the cursor was blinking but it would not accept any input. As if it had crashed. Going into the BIOS showed the hard drive as a bunch of gibberish, lots of weird characters you don't usually see in the BIOS. It can boot from a floppy, and when doing so, the OS says that the HD has no logical partitions (yeah right), and scandisk does a surface scan in less than 1 second. There is no letter assigned to the CD drive or the HD, meaning they are not being recognized. Turning the computer off and on again fixed the problem, but only temporarily. Leaving the computer on, it eventually froze, and restarting resulted in the same malfunction I described. Now, it has the problem 100% of the time. I've made sure the IDE cables are all secure, tried unplugging it, plugging it back in and turning it on after hours of cooling, nothing works. Could it have anything to do with summer starting now? I checked the CPU core temp when the comp was working, and it was, I think, 105F. Pretty low, as I recall. The fan works. No viruses found. I can't think of anything more to do. What would cause this failure?

Clear the CMOS from the mobo may be is a corrupted bios. To do this go to your mobo manual and look for this [CLEAR CMOS] almost all boards is JP5 jumper but not always, and change the mobo battery too.

Its possible the drive has suffered damage to the disk critical data and is presenting gebberish to the bios. Try www.computer-recovery.com they are good at recovery data form this sort of problems.

Sounds as a bad harddrive! Is the CD-Rom connected to the same ide cable as the harddrive ??? That may be the reason it's not working because the harddrive will be the master device and the CD the slave. With the harddrive not working the CD won't work either! Before doing anything else you should try another ide cable and also try another power connector. If that won't help unplug the CD (just remove the ide cable from it) in case this may be the problem. But check if the harddrive need a special jumper position as a single drive (chances are high with western digital!). If possible try the harddisk as an additional drive in another computer. If you don't have the possibility go to the next step! Download the diagnostic tool from the manufacturer of the harddrive. You should be able to make a bootdisk with the software. After making sure your bios is set to boot from the floppy disk first boot with the bootdisk and run the diagniostic tool. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The tool may ask you to format if there are certain errors but if you have important data on the drive abort and try the link from Rahad first to try to recover your data. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sounds like good advice from you guys, I'll try it out in a few weeks when she gets back. About the CMOS reset though... there's no manual for the mobo and I don't know where JP5 is located, but I suppose I'll find it somehow. Couldn't I clear the CMOS just by taking the battery out for a few seconds?