This is a sad end to the original drives.
After the failure with the GTX 260, I was really annoyed by a "detecting array" booting issue that was plaguing me after switching to the gateway motherboard. It would happen often, prevent booting, and would only go away by sheer luck. This got me frustrated enough that I dug up the OEM board that came with the emachines, cleaned it off, and tried using it once again. My suspicion that the board was dead was wrong, I found that it would boot with one stick of ram installed. So, it seemed that the issue was a dead ram channel.
By the time I had gotten it working, the state of the hard drives was critical. I now fully knew that the drives were dying, I could barely log in before blue screens would happen. My friend offered to help me back up my drives, he came over to lend some software and help - but it was too late. The C: drive died as I was backing it up, and the secondary K: drive died as well while trying to access it via an external HDD caddy. I still have both drives, waiting someday to get some parts to attempt a head swap and back up the contents on the cheap.
Afterwards, I took two SSDs I had gotten as gifts to create a fresh install of windows XP on. Originally, I tried loading an image of Media Center edition via USB - the first image didn't include a working activation code, the second I couldn't get to work at all. I eventually had to settle for a disc of Home Edition SP2 that was lying around the house. That one at least worked right off the bat and had a working activation code. I also received my next GPU in the mail around the same time, a Radeon 4670HD. The performance seemed alright, it was single slot, and had a cool design. Plus, it had S-Video out so I could easily connect it to my TV.
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