troubleshooting

[crackfeen]

hi everybody
i'm trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with my friend's computer... it doesn't boot all the way.. at first i thought it was his windows installation that was giving him trouble but the first thing i tried was take my working harddrive and plug it in but even that gets to the scrolling bar on xp and just goes back to the bios boot screen...
so far i've just unplugged all the cards that he had going... he had two different types of ram but i tried them both individually, i cleared the cmos just in case it was something in there. at this point that's all i can think of to do..
any ideas? since it boots all the way up to windows loading screen i can only assume that the cpu works as it should... where do i go from here
i can give specs as needed but i don't really think they matter at the moment
i appreciate any help or any experiences you wish to share with me

 

[oscaryu1]

Your hard drive will NOT work with his computer. Hard drives are not "plug and play". If you replaced your motherboard or such, you'd either have to do a Repair or a reformat.

Ask him if he had upgraded or replaced any parts.

 

[crackfeen]

that was the first thing i asked and he says no he didn't
as far as harddrives go, i've switched harddrives computer to computer without as much as a hiccup.. with his harddrives it's quite a bit worse.. i got my trusty xp cd and tried to boot or reformat it, and where it's supposed to give you partition information it says "setup cannot access this disk." and the only way i could think of that being the case is if the disk is locked but there is no way it would be

 

[oscaryu1]

Try doing a repair. If that still does not work, I'd say his HDD is dead/dying. Does it make any weird noises?