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PC problems (need the pro's)

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Singapura:
It's unlikely that the HD has affected your MB unless there's a short somewhere and then it could burn out the IDE controller which would mean no bootup at all. It's also unlikely that a hardware failure would somehow "transfer" to a good drive.  Because you're faulty computer's behavior is now displayed by your "good" one, it might be a virus. Scan thoroughly before continuing. Did you by any chance use the IDE cable from the "broken" drive and when you put in the old drive in the working computer, you left that in? I've had quite a few harddisks fail because of a faulty IDE cable, so you might want to replace it just to be sure. If that's not the case, try the harddisk from the working computer in the faulty one. Does it boot up and work okay? If so then at least there's nothing wrong with the MB or the rest of the stuff.  If it still reboots it's most probably the PSU. Check if it's heavy enough to power your equipment. I had rebooting problems when I put in a new graphics card because my PSU was only 250W. With a new 450W or better a 600W you're set for a long time. If you're PSU is only barely pulling the cart, you might have overloaded the PSU in your "good" computer, thus making it have the same symptoms.

shardian:
These are both older pc's. The one from work is a PIII 850mhz. The home pc is an AMD Duron 1.2 mhz. On the home computer, the RAM passed all tests. The hard drive showed 53 defects according to the boot disc. I can't find my xp disc for the home pc.

I doubt it is the PSU in either one. The PSU that blew up was original and 250W. I replaced it with a 300W. The home PC also has a 300W. Don't think it is a virus, as I formatted the bad PC's HD before I put it in the home PC.

I didn't swap any cables at all from pc to pc.

I figured I would also restate this: Right after I put the bad pc's WD HD in the home computer, it booted just fine into windows. I had to schedule the scan disk that way.

shmokes:
I'm thinking that the Master Boot Record on the old drive became corrupt and when you put it in your desktop computer your good drive's MBR was overwritten by the one on the bad drive.  Boot into the XP CD and run the Recovery Console.  Once you've selected your windows installation and you're all the way in to the prompt type the command:

fixmbr

This will write a new master boot record to your boot partition.  Now restart.

Warning: if there is a virus present it's possible that this could make your partitions inaccessible.

Another command you might try from the Recovery Console is fixboot.  That writes new boot sector code to the boot partition in case the boot sector became currupt.  I've never used this command before, though, so I can't comment on it personally.  I have fixed a number of computers with FIXMBR, though.

SirPeale:
You also might want to run MemTest86 on it for a few hours, see if anything bad pops up.

D-Lew:
I was thinking something wrong with the boot sector, virus, etc... something along those lines.

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