I was attempting to repair an eMachines which would not boot. Half way thru the boot a blue screen would appear which said a serious error had occurred and windows was shutting down to avoid damaging the machine.So I removed the HD and plugged it into my workbench machine and began deleting the partitions.There were three: a very small one, a second of about 800MB and the third of about 39GB. Anyway, after deleting the first two, I restarted the machine to delete the third, which I did, but when I re-stared my machine it would not boot - not even into BIOS. I've replaced everything I could think of but no luck. Could I have downloaded something from that HD into my BIOS?

Putting n/a for the system specs & make/model certainly isn't helpful. Why would you immediately begin deleting partitions? And how did you go about it? Did you run FDISK from a boot floppy? Some old machines had a portion of the BIOS placed a small hidden partition on the HDD...if you deleted it, it might explain why you can no longer boot. Or you may have removed the boot partition. Or maybe you reconnected the HDD cable backwards? We have no idea what you did or what you've tried...we need more info.

You could have a bad IDE ribbon cable,or you could try another 4 pin power plug. How do you have the hard drive jumpered now? http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/i...

So does anything at all show up on the screen? Disconnect the hard drive and see what happens.

All things are possible but it is unlikely that you downloaded anything that affected BIOS unless it was a definite BIOS flash. some other bloke...

I posted a reply several days ago but it somehow got deleted. Anyway, I changed monitors and my bench machine is working again. I'd still like to know how deleting a partition can keep a computer from booting! Thanx.

If you delete the partition its not going to boot. Windows is installed into a partition. No partition no boot. Keyboard not detected. Hit F1 to Continue. BREAKFAST.SYS HALTED Cerial port not Responding!!