I was helping trouble shoot a friends computer so I disconnected mine to fix his. Well when I plugged my PC back in it would not power up. There is a green LED right underneath the power cord (assuming it is related to power supply). I did a quick search and I firmly believe it is the power supply. Wanted your guys input here first. Most importantly I have some extremely important business files on the PC that I need to use ASAP. How can I temp. get these files to my other PC. My main pc is a sata based system and this is a old ide based hard drive, any ideas on this? Thanks in advance.

Update: I went to hp site and finally found this: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/... Followed steps and here is the last part is they have you disconnect everything from the power supply and then look at the LED here is my result: "If the LED is on solid and is not flashing, the power supply is probably good and the problem is most likely caused by a defective component (processor, memory, PCI card) or a defective motherboard. Have the computer serviced, or remove the components and replace them, one at a time, to find and replace the defective component." How did a component get defective from me just disconnecting my computer and moving it like 2 feet? Do you think that I should still try replacing the power supply (my friends got one I could use)? Should I even bother trouble shooting this thing or should I just buy a new one (PC is like 4 years old). Lastly what the easiest way to get my data off of the hardrive.

Did you unplug the PS, or otherwise remove the AC power to it, before you dis- connected or connected it? If you didn't, ATX PSs are always on to some extent as long as live AC is supplied to them, and are always powering the mboard in some places, whether the computer is on or not, and you can damage the PS or anything connected to it if you didn't disconnect the live AC power. Are you sure you connected the PS as it was before? E.g. some mboards require a second power connector to the mboard in addition to the main connector. Are you sure all your other connections inside the computer case are fine? Have you tried making sure all your cards and ram are all the way down in their slots? "If the LED is on solid and is not flashing, the power supply is probably good and the problem is most likely caused by a defective component ...." That isn't necessarily true. Failing PSs are very common. They often partially work yet the computer won't boot. By all means, try your friend's PS if it has the same wiring at the main connector and has enough capacity. Check your PS. See response 4 in this: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... The data on your hard drive is probably fine in any case. If you can't get your own computer to work, you can connect it to another computer to get it's data. E.g. If it is an IDE drive, if you connect it as slave on either IDE header, or as master on the secondary IDE, you can access the data on the drive as is. However, I don't recommend you boot from that hard drive on the other computer, unless it is an identical HP computer. If you connect as master on the primary IDE and boot that hard drive, or select that hard drive to boot with in the other computer's bios Setup on the other computer whatever way it is connected, XP probably won't load Windows if the hardware on the other mboard is more than a little different. Typically you see the first bit of Windows graphics, then a black screen with a blinking cursor top left and nothing further happens. You can't fix that any way I know of if you have still have the name brand system software installation on the computer. (You CAN fix that without losing the data already on the drive if you no longer have the original HP software installation on the drive and Windows was installed from a regular Windows CD, by running a Repair Setup procedure, then loading the mboard drivers.) You probably can't re-install the original HP software installation from scratch on a different mboard even if you have the proper single HP Recovery CD or have made that in Windows, or have made a Recovery CD set or have gotten one from HP, because the installation probably checks for a HP bios version and probably a specific mboard or group of mboards that the HP software is matched to.

You can spend $25 dollars and get an external Hard Drive case from Circuit City, CompuUSA or Best Buy. The first two have them cheaper than Best Buy. Just put your Hard drive in that and you can recover the data. All you have to do is plug it into another computer's USB port. But it will probably have to be XP or Windows 2000. It probably won't work with Windows 98 just because it wouldn't be able to see NTFS (the XP File system). My brother was helping his girl friends father with his HP PC, it worked fine except a HD problem before he unplugged. Now it won't boot or power up. I am A+ and Dell certified and working on all computers since 1980. I tested his power supply and it tests good. It may be the switch on the front. If you took the front cover off, make sure you put it back on correctly. If the switch is too low or too high it won't connect right. It may also have been the motherboard. The Power Supply still has power in it even after you unplug the cable from the wall. It may have been a fluke thing. The Power supply or motherboard or even the chip may have been shorted out. You may want to get a new PC. You can try buying a new power supply but they cost about $80 dollars. You can buy a cheap PC for about $300 to $400 dollars. Good Luck

Cheaper than an external case would be a USB2IDE adapter cable, $9. http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?in...

"I was helping trouble shoot a friends computer so I disconnected mine to fix his". From the above quote I surmise you connected your friend's case to your KB, Mouse, Power cable, monitor, etc? You mention a green LED but don't indicate if it is lighting up or not. Did you open your case at all? Did you disconnect the power to your computer prior to unplugging the accesories?