I bought an emachines computer about a year ago with vista home. My hard drive died, how do I install vista on a new drive, I have no install disk for vista.

the new hard drive has to be Formatted using the format command. look up dos format command or a utility program. then you have to reinstall Windows ?(whatever you had i guess) on the pc. any drivers disk for that pc needs to run after you format the hard drive and before installing the Windows operating system. exactly how depends. go on the HOW TO search site to find the exact steps -

the old hard disk died a month ago and you got a new new one now rt? that means you were not using your computer for one month.So there is a chance of processor heat sink paste worned out and processor is getting hot. So you need to remove the heat sink and apply new heat sink paste and re-fix processor, re-fix ram sticks also.. make sure processor fan is working well.

if its still having problem, you need to check the SMPS...

Another reason, you need check to the compatibility of mother board with hard disk. That means, you need to check how much size of hard disk your motherboard will support?

you don't need drivers for a new hard-drive  but your motherboard may need usb drivers   go to your computers manufacturers website to find drivers.  A new hard-drive needs to be set up  in control panel administrator tools/computer management/disk management  you can try to activate your new drive  then format it  if Vista format in NTFS  if XP either NTFS or the older Fat32   if you can't activate the new drive get Acronis Disk Director from torrents or rapidshare or filetopia etc  if you need remote assistance I am in filetopia in the All Good Things room  I'm The_MacGyver

No, you need to go into your computer's BIOS and set the ahcp mode to IDE. Then windows xp will see it just fine.

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Hope I can help you with your problem. If your hard drive was installed to be used as D: in your old computer then you will have to set it up to be D: in the new computer. This may be why it is not being recognized. You can do this by connecting it as a slave on the primary IDE cable.
Also you will need to check the jumper on the hard drive to make sure it is set in the slave position.

You can get a 1 terabyte sata hard drive from Newegg for 99 bucks. For that price why play with a failing drive. If you get one I will help you set it up with out the Gateway ****. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136151

waharris007,

I had the same problem...I originally thought it might be a ram chip and I started testing them...Turns out that the second ram socket was bad and I just had to remove one of the ram chips.

You can get to the BIOS by hitting DEL or F2 at start up.

However, that does not have anything to do with a drive letter.

Drive letter designation is set in
START>SETTINGS>CONTROL PANEL>ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS>COMPUTER MANAGEMENT>DISK MANAGEMENT.

Hope this helps.

Most package systems like that will partition the hard drive and place the recovery image on the smaller partition of the drive. I don't know about this specific system/model, but I'd bet that is the case, and explains why you have no Recovery CD. Now, you need to understand that if you restore that image, it will be what the system had in place when you bought it two years ago. So, BACK UP YOUR DATA!! You will lose everything you have done for the last two years.

Now, having upgraded to Vista, there is no way to downgrade from Vista and end up with the XP you had before. You're going to have to format and start over. Did your computer come with a CD that allows you to boot and access the recovery partition on your hard drive?

Normally on systems like yours, you are prompted to create a restore disk when you first fire the system up. Did that happen with you? Did you create one?

Perhaps check this article on eldergeek: http://www.theeldergeek.com/re-enable_system_restore.htm

get simple windows xp you just have to format deep with emachines as ntfs ive ran windows complete programs on emachines with out a problem and created straight recovery disk simple to be ran in windows safemode
now your hard drive
depending on which brand hard drive you have there is a couple out there that have data compression problems over 80 gig these harddrives over 80 gig have a crash ratio of 8 to 1 sea gate about 2 years ago had this problem dont know if they corrected it yet
quite possible your hard drive did not die at all but the power supply just didnt have the juice to push it check hdd by another source of power