I'm guessing it's drawing too much power.

Remove the power cord. Remove the battery.Press and hold the power button for 30 seconds, repeat. Plug it in without the battery. Try to turn it on. If it comes on, carefully install the battery - yes you can do this with the power on.

Please provide feedback if it does.
- Mark

When you say "regardless of what hard drive I plug in" worries me.

If you didn't install windows on the hard drive you're using while it was in your computer it won't work. Windows needs to see all devices as it is installed.

My best guess for you is to install windows again onto a hard drive.

Failing that you could download one of the linux O/S, say UBUNTU, and that will load onto your pc without installing so you can look at the data on the HDD's.

Finally there's the ultimate boot for windows CD which loads a windows shell onto your PC without installing and provides loads of diagnostic tools.

Both the last two items are freely available to download at the end of a GOOGLE.

can your reformat it? if not then sounds as if it's fried and any computer you have it hooked to will have issues during the boot cycle

sometimes usb hard drives will not work through a usb hub.
if the drive works connected to the laptop but not the hub then that's how you'll have to use it.
it's also possible the laptop cannot power both the hub AND the drive, in whaich case you'll need a powered hub (one you plug in to the mains).

Hi..
This happen due to 3 reasons,
The Hard drive is bad.
The BIOS Setting have to be put to SATA.
During the the installation the have to press the F6 option to install the SATA drive drivers.

Let me know
Thanks
Smith

Need way more information, Gill.

I'm going to go out on a limb and paraphrase your problem as:
You installed a new hard drive, reloaded the operating system and Windows (XP?) loads, but you have no volume control and hear no sounds from the speaker.

If I have guessed correctly, then you probably need to load the sound card driver.

If I have missed the boat, please submit your problem in more detail beginning with a detailed description of the problem, the operating system, how long ago this happened and what happened that may have contributed to the problem.

Visiting the e-machine website should get you to the support page with sound card drivers.

If you can't find it, let me know.

Honest1abe

It appears that your USB hard disk is drawing power that exceeds what the computer's USB port can deliver.
If your USB drive has a power adapter, connect it to your USB drive before you connect it to the computer's USB port.
If your USB drive does not have a power adapter/connector then you need to insert your USB drive into a USB hub that is powered from the mains adapter. Connect this hub to your computer's USB port first and then connect the USB drive into the powered hub.

If none of this works then it is possible that you have a faulty hard drive. If possible test this drive in a computer, use a old computer.

if your hard drive making a unusual noise there something happened to the internal parts of the drive. does your hard drive accidentally dropped?

ok. check your jumper settings. set your jumper to slave. try it might work.

Well, I'm amazed a C640 runs Vista at all. There's no reason to buy a new hard drive, except for the novenlty of having one loaded with Vista on a C640. It's a great laptop, and runs Windows XP PRo perfectly well. If you have one od the Dell XP install disks, just boot from it, and whenever it finds the vista install, hit excape, then at the next screen hit "D" to delete the partition, then choose "quick format", and load the Operation system. If you need an install disk,let me know. Good luck

Your symptoms sound like a slow hard drive. The first time you run Word or some other program the PC has to read the file from the hard drive into memory. You have enough RAM so that the program is still stored there till the next time you run the same program. When you run it again RAM is much faster so you experience the increased speed. This is fairly typical behavior for a PC; in fact one of the big industry discussions right now is how Vista with its huge operating system is really going to strain the limits of traditional hard drives. While Word can take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds to load on a typical PC Corel Draw is a much larger program and takes considerably longer. Things that could affect your hard drive speed: - It could just be an older hard drive. Generally the smaller the hard drive the older and slower it is. If you hard drive is smaller than 20 GB then an upgrade will boost your speed - Your drive may not be configured to work as efficiently as it could. If you?re using IDE hard drives make sure the channel is running DMA not PIO. - Your drive could be heavily fragmented. I?m generally not a big fan of defragging since the results are seldom worth it. In you case you may get enough of a boost to make a difference. Make sure you have a backup just in case something goes awry. - Drive interface, IDE is the slowest, next is EIDE and the fastest is Serial ATA or SATA which is replacing IDE/EIDE on newer motherboards.