When I try to boot up this win xp emachines I get-- A disk read error occurred. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart. I put in #1 of the three system restore cds. I get WARNING all info on C will be lost. I type Y it starts to install but stops after about 15% or so and I get---- Output A:\ghosterr.txt? I click yes and get--- Cannot open Ghosterr.txt insert diskette. If I cleck NO I get A:\> What do I do? I have no diskette. Do I need one and if so where do I get one?

see if this helps:

output A:\ghosterr.TXT : it is trying to give you a txt file (written reason) for failing. and in its own cryptic way. because you cannot write to a cd and the hard drive might be corrupt. the only place it can do this is to your floppy drive, put a floppy disk in the drive and see what it writes.

you may need another computer to read it.

It wrote nothing to a diskette. It now says---Cannot open ghosterr.txt insert diskette. then I click OK. It's still doing the same.

Cannot open ghosterr.txt insert diskette

do you know what kind of hard drive you have?

from the manufacturers site you can download a diagnostic file to create a boot floppy that will check out your hard drive.

here is a list:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

from the search above i see either hard drive failure or your disk is corrupted.
testing the drive would be a first step.

How do I find out what HD I have on this emachines?

is there a model # somewhere? a label on the side of the box?

btw all the errors i see that match yours are from emachine & there are quite a few.

just to clarify: you cannot boot this machine at this time?

i will search emachine but a specific model # would help.

i see that eMachines manufactures their own hard drives

Manufacturer: eMachines

also found a support area specificaly for recovery issues

http://www.emachines.com/support/tech_support.html


hope this helps

I pulled out the HD and on it had seatools, so I downloaded from the web you gave. I made the 2 disk ok. Then tryed---Still not working. I have a win 98 HD for testing. I put it in the emachines and it worked, ofcourse I couldn't get all the drivers but I got to win98se desktop ok, the cd is working and the floppy. So everthing else is working but the HD.

Is it an old machine? Any chance of warranty? You should check with eMachines to see what options you have as to restoring your XP on a new drive.

I'm not sure of it's age. I had the cd in on boot up. I took it out. Now I'm getting---Can't load BDOS kernel file. A:\IBMDOS.com System halted