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Message: I am trying to fix my moms old emachine laptop. When you start it up it said no hard drive found. So I went and purchased a new hard drive and upgraded GB.Now when it starts it says no operating system found. I still have the recovery disk the computer came with. The computer will not boot the CD, I have changed the boot setting to boot from CD in the bios, but still no luck. Any suggestions?
Try the Emachines web site. Look for help in installing a new hard drive.
OEM machines normally have a partition on the hard drive with an image of the system It is used to do the restore (reinstall). A new hard drive wil not have that image.
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The laser lens in the drive may be dirty.
Try a laser lens cleaning CD in the optical drive, or if the laser lens is obvious when the tray is ejected, clean it with something such as a Q tip or tissue.Optical drives do not last forever. Often the first thing that happens is the bearings in the motor deteriorate to the point they produce so much friction that the motor can no longer spin at 1X (the original Audio CD speed), and eventually it won't spin at all.
It's easy to test for no spin - note the postion of a CD on the tray, insert the tray, let it try to spin, eject the tray - if the CD is in the same postion time after time, the motor is not spinning - but it's harder to determine if it's spinning too slowly.
If the led on the drive does not come on when a CD and the tray is inserted, it's circuits are no good. If the led comes on but stays on for a longer time than is usual, or binks on and off for longer than usual, the drive motor probably has the bad bearing problem.Your bios MUST recognize the optical drive, and the hard drive.
If it can, you should be able to see it can in the bios, and you may see the models of the drives detected on the first black screen as you boot, though that may be obscured if a logo (graphical) screen is displayed while booting.
It does NOT matter whether the optical drive is listed first in the bios boot order, as long as it is listed before all hard drives.
If you can do it in your bios, the best way to have the boot order settings for most people's use is floppy drive first (if you have one), optical drive second, hard drive third - if you can set it that way most people do not ever have to change the boot order - it works for any booting situation.
In all the bioses I've tried it in, if you list floppy drive after optical drive in the boot order, a bootable floppy in the floppy drive is not recognized as bootable while booting.The single bootable Recovery CD that may have come with the system (are you SURE that's what it is - most computers these days do NOT come with one - you are supposed to make it yourself - it may be a CD with only drivers, etc., on it) is supposed to be used along with the intact original data contents of the second partition brand name computers always have on the original hard drive when you first get the computer.
That single Recovery CD is USELESS if that second partition is not present or altered, or if you are trying to load a blank hard drive.
If the Recovery program loads at all it will quit when it finds the intact unaltered second partition is not there.
If you want to recover the original emachines software installation, you need a Recovery CD set. You were (she was) supposed to make that set, and probably the single Recovery CD that can be used with an intact second partition, by using an emachines supplied program already in your Programs list somewhere, while Windows and the computer were still working fine. If you have (she has) NOT done that, you might be able to order the Recovery CD set from the emachines site for your exact model - if you can it's often cheaper than even a regular OEM Home CD.If you can't get the Recovery CD set, if the case has the official Microsoft sticker with the Product Key on it, your OEM software licence allows you to use that Product Key along with a regular Windows CD of the same version that is in the original software installation, and it is okay to use a bootable copy of someone else's suitable Windows CD.
When Setup is finished, you have to load the drivers for the mboard, particularly the main chipset drivers, and you will probably also have to go to the emachines web site to get other drivers for the components on the mboard or in card slots too. If Setup found the drivers for your network adapter before Setup was finished, you can Activate Windows near the end of Setup, or after Setup is finished, no problem - if it didn't, you need to get the network adapter drivers first and load them, or Activate by phone.
.......You WILL have problems with bootable CDs if the computer is having problems reading the ram.
A common thing that can happen with ram, even ram that worked fine previously, is the ram has, or has developed, a poor connection in it's slot(s).
This usually happens a long time after the ram was installed, but it can happen with new ram, or after moving the computer case from one place to another, and I've had even new modules that needed to have their contacts cleaned.See response 2 in this - try cleaning the contacts on the ram modules, and making sure the modules are properly seated:
http://www.computing.net/hardware/w...For a laptop, you must remove both its main battery and AC adapter before you do that.
.....
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On some bios' a bootable drive can be disabled but still be in the boot order list.
Do you have any other bootable disk, maybe a regular XP disk? That might tell you if the problem is with the cdrom or the cd.
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I will try to download the same version OS from a friends cd and go from there. Thank you all so much for the help!
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"I will try to download the same version OS from a friends cd and go from there."
You don't download it.
If you want the copied CD to be bootable, you have to use a burning program to copy the entire original CD using "Disk at Once" or similar.
The *.img file on the CD that makes the CD bootable is invisible to Windows and most programs. If you merely copy the data contents of the CD to another CD, it will not be bootable - if you copy it using "Disk at Once" or similar, the invisible *.img file is automatically copied as well.
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I meant I will use their copy of the cd and use my product key. That should work I hope. Then I guess I have to download drivers for the computer????
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You should make a copy of their CD - on a CD-R disk is the best choice - you will need a copy of Windows, sooner or later. As I have said, you can't load XP MCE unless you use the OEM 2 CD set.
If you are using a SATA hard drive, depending on settings in the mboard bios, Setup may find no hard drive.
If that happens to you, let me, or us, know, and we'll tell you what you need to do.If Setup finds the drivers automatically for your network adapter, it is easy to Activate Windows near the end of Setup - if it doesn't you have to get them on another computer, copy them to something, then install them on your own computer, to be able to Activate Windows, or you can Activate Windows by phone.
Whenever you load Windows from a regular Windows CD (or DVD) from scratch, after Setup is finished you must load the drivers for the mboard, particularly the main chipset drivers, in order for Windows to have the proper drivers for and information about your mboard hardware, including it's AGP or PCI-E, ACPI, and hard drive controller support. If you have a generic system and have the CD that came with the mboard, all the necessary drivers are on it. If you load drivers from the web, brand name system builders and mboard makers often DO NOT have the main chipset drivers listed in the downloads for your model - in that case you must go to the maker of the main chipset's web site, get the drivers, and load them.
You will probably also need to go to the emachines web site and get the driver downloads for your model, and install them.
Then you need to Update Windows. The fastest way of doing that is to go to the Microsoft Windows Update page. Windows Automatic Updates does that too, but it doesn't load them all in one shot - it may take several days or longer if Automatic Updates does that.
Go to the Adobe site, and get at least the latest version of the Flash Player. You can also get the Acrobat Reader for reading *.pdf files (e.g. manuals) - you can choose to install an older version if you like, and the Shockwave Player, if you might install Shockwave games, etc.
You will need at least one anti-malware program - e.g. the free version of AVG 8.x, or your ISP (Internet Service Provider) may have free anti-malware software that's provided along with your internet service you can download.
You can safely access the Microsoft, the Adobe, and the AVG web sites, and probably other anti-malware web sites and your ISP's web site, before you have loaded anti-malware software - just don't randomly search on the web, for other than major sites that are unlikely to be contaminated, before it's installed. It's a good idea to NOT install any anti-malware software until AFTER you have installed the Windows Updates, especially the SP3 updates.
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So I got the copy of Xp Home from a friend tried it and it would not boot in the emachine so it was the cdrom. I got my external cd/dvd rom and hooked it up to the emachine. It said it still couldn't use the recovery disk but at least it told me this time. I then put in the windows XP cd. I got all excited because the setup screen came up and told me it was copying files. After a little bit it stopped and said it couldn't find the hard drive to copy the files too... So I got one problem solved now on to another one. It is a brand new hard drive. Why couldn't XP find it? I took it out and made sure I put it in a good conection. Still no luck....
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Please! - supply the emachines model number - it's usually obvious on a label on the outside of the case somewhere.
....."It said it still couldn't use the recovery disk but at least it told me this time."
See the middle of Response 2 - you can't load a blank hard drive with the original emachines software installation unless you have a Recovery disk set.
"I got all excited because the setup screen came up and told me it was copying files. After a little bit it stopped and said it couldn't find the hard drive"
The initial loading of files from the Windows CD enables support for running Setup - it doesn't run until the hard drive is found and you allow Setup to run, a little later in the process.
As I said above, second paragraph response 7, ....
"If you are using a SATA hard drive, depending on settings in the mboard bios, Setup may find no hard drive."If Setup doesn't find the hard drive, you probably have a SATA hard drive - depending on settings in your mboard bios, Setup may not detect the drive because it doesn't have the drivers for the SATA controller on the mboard built into the files on the CD.
Go into your bios Setup and set the SATA controller(s) or the SATA drive detection to IDE compatible or similar, save bios settings.
Then boot using the XP CD again, and Setup should find the SATA drive fine.The XP CD must have at least SP1 updates included on it in order to detect the full size of a hard drive larger than 137gb (=128gb in your bios, in Setup, and in Windows, and in order for it to support it detecting USB 2.0 controllers on the mboard. If the CD has SP2 updates included that's printed on the original CD. You can't tell if it has SP1 updates included on it by anything printed on the orginal CD.
You can add support for detecting USB 2.0 controllers on the mboard by loading SP1 or SP2 updates, but you can't make the partition(s) on the hard drive larger (or smaller) in XP itself without losing the data on the partition Windows is on.It is a very good idea to NOT make just one partition that takes up the entire hard drive - you should make at least two - you only need to set the size of the first partition in Setup - the second one, or the other ones, can be partitioned and formatted after Setup has finished.
The amount to leave for the second partition depends on what you want to be able to do with the hard drive. At the very least, leave about 5gb of space (each gb is 1,024mb) for backing up valuable data - better still, the second partition could be a lot bigger, to accommdate data such as movies, music, etc, that does not need to be on the same partition Windows is on - that way if you need to reload Windows on C, the partition it was installed on, the data on the second partition (or other partitions) does not have to be wiped out.
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Okay so here is some more information the model of the emachine is M622-UK8X, I figure it is about 4-5 years old. The hard drive is an EIDE. I really don't know where to go in the bios to change settings or what they should be and what they shouldn't be. Here is a list of everything on the front of the bios under MAIN:
---
System Time
System Date- 2004
Primary Master- Auto
Secondary Master- Auto
CPU Type-AMD Turion 64 mobile
CPU Speed- 1800 Mhz
System memory- 634 KB
Extended memory- 456704kb
Bios version- 67.08.00
KBC version- 4914
---------------------------
So I don't know if that helps or not. I have tried the xp cd again and still it stops and says (Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer)
I hope someone can help, thanks....
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Either, as already mentioned, your XP disk isn't at least sp1 or the laptop is not 48-bit LBA compliant (or both). You can look at the XP disk to see what version it is.
I couldn't find any info on the LBA issue. Apparently your model is the W4620 on the emachine site. That support page is here:
http://www.emachines.com/support/pr...
Normally if a PC isn't 48-bit compliant you'd look for a bios upgrade but no updates show there.
If it is an LBA issue then you can either replace the 160 with one that's about 120 gig or less. Or you an install a drive overlay. That should be on the installation disk that came with the drive or on the drive manufacturer's site. But of course first verify what version the XP disk is.
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"Historically, eMachines laptops have been made by Arima, and this unit is no exception, as it is stamped on the bottom of the unit Arima M622-UK8X (http://www.arima.com.tw/ViewProduct.asp?View=134)"
http://www.notebookreview.com/defau...Emachine assigns the w4620 model number to your M622-UK8X.
Your model does appear to use an IDE (EIDE) hard drive, an 80gb one originally.
The Windows CD should find the hard drive you installed no problem, if there is nothing wrong with the way it is connected and jumpered, and if there is nothing wrong with your bios settings.Even if your laptop has a bios version old enough that it can't recognize a hard drive larger than 137gb manufacturer's size (128gb in Windows and in the mboard's bios), which I very much doubt, and/or if the Windows CD you are using does not have SP1 or later updates included, the Windows CD should still see an IDE hard drive - if there is a size limitation, it should STILL see about a 128gb size, in ANY case.
"You can look at the XP disk to see what version it is."
If the CD has SP2 updates included that's printed on the original CD. On all of the CDs with SP1 updates included I have seen, you can't tell if it has SP1 updates included on it by anything printed on the original CD, so you can't, from what's printed on it, tell a CD with SP1 updates from one that does not have them.
The mboard bios must recognize the hard drive is there.
You have said:
"System Time
System Date- 2004"Are the current time and date correct in the bios??
If they are NOT, that can indicate the cmos battery that allows settings in the bios to be retained is too waek or dead - typically they usually last about 5 years
OR - you or someone has flashed the bios and has/have not yet set the time and date."Primary Master- Auto
Secondary Master- Auto"The drive detection on a particular Primary and/or Secondary IDE channel must be set to Auto, and the drive detection TYPE must be set to Auto or LBA.
The two are often set on the same line in the bios, the latter on the right end of the line.
When you load bios defaults on more recent computers, both of those are set to those settings, on both IDE channels (Primary, Secondary).
If you're not sure if bios settings have been messed up, loading bios defaults re-sets everything.There may also be some other indication in the bios the hard drive has been detected, such as it's model number, or if there is a selection to detect hard drives a hard drive should be found.
On many computers you see the model numbers of the hard drive and optical drive displayed on the first black screen as you boot, although that may be obscured by a logo (graphical) screen - in some bioses you can disable the display of the logo screen, or turning off Quick boot or similar may disable the logo screen, and/or show you more text about what is going on while booting, including the drive model numbers.Remove the AC adapter and the main battery.
- Make sure the hard drive is contacting the connections in the laptop properly.
- All IDE laptop drives have standard pins/a standard header - something must be plugged into that header to adapt it to connecting it to the particular laptop contacts, or on some older laptops, a short cable. The hard drive has no connection to the laptop without that adapter. It may appear that that adapter is integrated onto the old drive, but it is not - it prys off and can be transferred to the replacement hard drive
- IDE laptop drives have master/slave/cable select jumper settings. When you get a new drive it is usually jumpered either master or cable select - if it is a used drive, or if you have fiddled with the jumper settings, older bios versions will often not recognize a drive set to slave at all.
......If none of that info allows the Windows CD to find the IDE hard drive, the laptop mboard has been damaged, or the drive is no good (extremely unlikely for a new hard drive).
Both hard drives can be checked to see whether they actually work by connecting then via a cheap adapter to a desktop computer's IDE, or by installing them in an external case meant for an IDE laptop drive (jumper the drive master or cable select)
What can damage a laptop mboard?
- when the AC adapter is plugged in, an AC power spike or surge, often experienced before or after a power outage
- a static electricity discharge
- a lightning strike near your location, or when the AC adapter and/or a network cable is plugged in, a lightning strike on the power grid near you
- a faulty AC adapter
- dropping the laptop
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So I have taken the logo off so I can see what it says at start-up like you guys suggested. Here is what it says:
-
CPU=AMD Turian 64 Mobile
637K System Ram Passed
446 Extended Ram Passed
512K Cache SRam Passed
System Bios shadowed
Video Bios Shadowed
-
Then the black screen comes on and says:
Broadcom UNDI PXE 2.1 v8.2.6
Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Broadcom Corp.
All rights reserved
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM
Operating System not found
-----Under the bios for the primary master it says [NONE]
then I go into that area and here is the rest of it.
Primary and secondary set at [auto]
Multi-Sector transfers [16 sectors]
LBA Mode control [Enabled]
32 Bit I/o [Enabled]
Transfer mode: [FPIO 4/DMAZ]
Ultra DMA Mode [Mode 5]
---
The time and date are wrong. I unplugged the power and took out the battery thinking some miracle was going to happen and it would work. I know I just gave you a lot of info, I was hoping I could save the computer for my mom but it is looking slim. Is there a way to check to see if the mother board is bad?
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well I just off of a chat with the emachine people, they wouldn't tell me much since the warrenty is up on the computer. What I think I got from him was that I can not upgrade to a 160 GB hard drive. So I guess I will take this one back and order another 80GB. It just sucks because if that isn't the problem I am out $60 since there are not returns on the 80GB hard drive. Any suggestions?
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Your model's mboard and bios DOES NOT have a hard drive size limit.
There are MANY listings on the web for a hard drive larger than 137mb manufacturers's size -
E.g. here's one for a 160gb drive
(w4620 = M622-UK8X)
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-160GB-Lapto...
.......Your problem is the bios is not detecting the hard drive, probably because of any of....
- you don't have the drive connected and/or jumpered correctly
- settings are screwed up in the bios Setup
- very unlikely - the drive isn't working
- quite unlikely - the mboard is damagedYou may also have a dead cmos battery, but that does not effect whether the bios detects a drive properly.
....."Then the black screen comes on and says:
Broadcom UNDI PXE 2.1 v8.2.6
Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Broadcom Corp.
All rights reserved
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM
Operating System not found"That's a common bunch of messages you get with laptops.
You are getting those messages because the bios is not finding a bootable hard drive, or a bootable floppy, or a bootable CD, or possibly a bootable USB connected drive, and it is defaulting to attempting to boot from your wired network adapter as the next choice, which has boot rom data on it (PXE ROM). If there is no networking data cable plugged into it that connects to something else, you get "Media test failure, check cable" If the cable is connected to something but not to a suitable network, you would get probably get an additional error. If nothing suitable is found that the network adapter can connect to, the software quits - "PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM" and the bios continues to boot the laptop, then finds "Operating System not found" (nothing has been found to be bootable).If you fix the problem that is causing the bios to not detect a bootable hard drive, or any other bootable device, you won't get that bunch of messages.
If the hard drive has no data on it (new drives come that way) you must install Windows on the drive by booting the computer with a bootable regular Windows CD, or you must install the original emachines software installtion on it by booting the computer using the first CD in a Recovery CD set for your model (a single Recovery CD meant to be used along with the contents of the second partition on the orginal hard drive will not work with a blank hard drive).
.....
"Under the bios for the primary master it says [NONE]"
"The time and date are wrong."
Short answer - try loading bios defaults, save bios settings. If the Time and Date are incorrect, set them too while you're at it.If that doesn't help, remove the AC adapter and the main battery and make sure the hard drive is connected properly. A new hard drive WILL NOT work as is - you MUST plug in something into it's socket to adapt it to connecting it to your laptop. The old drive may look like it has a an adapter that is different, but you have to remove something from it and install it on the new hard drive.
You may NOT have hooked up or jumpered the 160gb hard drive correctly.
"All IDE laptop drives have standard pins/a standard main header - something must be plugged into that header to adapt it to connecting it to the particular laptop contacts, or on some older laptops, a short cable. The hard drive has no connection to the laptop without that adapter. It may appear that that adapter is integrated onto the old drive, but it is not - it prys off (be careful) and can be transferred to the replacement hard drive"
The hard drive must be jumpered as master (preferable) or cable select.
Possible improper bios settings....Either....
- you or someone else has set the detection of drives on the Primary channel to NONE,
- or it was set to Auto and the bios is not seeing the hard drive at all.
- or the Primary or both drive controllers have been turned off in the bios settings
- or, extremely unlikely, the mboard is damaged.Your bios Setup is set, by defaults, to enable all drive controllers, and set to Auto detect drives on the Primary and Secondary channels, by the method Auto or LBA, but those settings can be set to something else by the user.
If you load bios defaults, save settings, the bios should find the hard drive automatically after that, if it's working and is connected properly, and if there is nothing wrong with the mboard.
...."Primary and secondary set at [auto]
Multi-Sector transfers [16 sectors]
LBA Mode control [Enabled]
32 Bit I/o [Enabled]
Transfer mode: [FPIO 4/DMAZ]
Ultra DMA Mode [Mode 5]"These may all be default settings and don't necessrily indicate the bios is finding the hard drive. The first and third line enable the detection of any size of drive, but your 160gb drive probably runs in UDMA 6 mode (133mb/sec max) (although your mboard chipset may be limited to UDMA 5 max (100mb/sec max)
.......
"The time and date are wrong."
Either
- the cmos battery is no good,
- or someone flashed the bios, which will set the time and date to defaults, and did not re-set the time and date after doing that.
To rule out someone having flashed the bios, try correcting the time and date in the bios, save bios settings (it would be a good idea in this case to load bios defaults as well) .
- If the Time and Date remain correct after you shut off the computer and remove the AC adapter, and then connect power again and try booting, the Cmos battery is okay.- If the Time and Date become wrong again (set themselves back to defaults) after you shut off the computer and remove the AC adapter, and then connect power again and try booting, the cmos battery is too weak, or completely dead.
Your bios has both read-only data that cannot be viewed by you, or changed by you (except by flashing the bios), and data that has settings that can be changed by the user or according to what ram, drives, and cpu you have installed, in the cmos part of the bios, that requires the cmos battery be okay to retain those settings when the computer has been shut off, even when the main battery has been removed.
Another indication........
You bios probably has current voltage readings in it somewhere, which are provided by readings from sensors built into the mboard, that you can look at - one of those voltage readings is often for the Cmos (or mboard) battery - an okay cmos battery is usually +3 or +3.3 volts (it may be more on a laptop) - if that reading says 0 volts or a lot less than +3 or +3.3 volts (or whatever the voltage is supposed to be), your Cmos battery needs to be replaced.I tried searching for w4620 "cmos battery" and M622-UK8X "cmos battery", but so far I have not found one.
......Please make sure you have NOT made typos, or left things out, when you report specs.
"CPU=AMD Turian 64 Mobile"
That should be
CPU=AMD Turion 64 Mobile"637K System Ram Passed"
Some bioses report the amount of ram used by the system that the operating system and the user cannot use for data - usually that's 640kb - or the total conventional memory amount that the operating system and the user cannot use for data - 640kb + 384kb for upper conventional memory = 1,024kb (1mb) , and the bios subtracts that from the total ram available to the user and Windows.
"446 Extended Ram Passed"
That's probably supposed to be
448mb Extended Ram Passed,
or 447mb Extended Ram Passed.
If you have onboard (built into the chipset) video, the amount of ram shared with the video is not available to the user and to Windows, so some bioses subtract that shared amount from the total ram amount.It looks like you have 512mb of ram installed, and 64mb of that is shared with the onboard video - that = 448 mb of ram left that Windows and the user can use.
If the bios also subtracts 1mb (1,024kb) for the conventioal memory amount, that = 447mb of ram left that Windows and the user can use.
.....If you have MORE than 512mb of ram installed, that is another matter - your bios is not detecting the ram properly - the most common causes of that is either you have installed ram that is NOT 100% compatible with your computer, or the mboard is having a problem reading the ram because of a poor connection in it's slots.
......"Both hard drives can be checked to see whether they actually work by connecting then via a cheap adapter to a desktop computer's IDE, or by installing them in an external case meant for an IDE laptop drive (jumper the drive master or cable select)"
If you need more info about that, let me know.
If your mboard IS defective, I found while searching for a cmos battery that you can get a replacement mboard off the web for this model, sometimes for a very cheap price.
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Well I reset the bios to the default and set the clock and date to the correct time. Unplugged the power and took out the battery and I started it up again and the time was correct so I guess I won't need that part. I am going away for the weekend so I will try and work on the hard drive issue when I come back. Have a safe holiday!
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