Thought i'd get some help before I take the desktop to a local shop. I am terrible at computer hardware.

1. XP crashes half way during load
2. Bios only detects one HD (says IDE but I am S-ATA?) partition, it's in the master 5 slot.
3. There is no slave?
4. It happened shortly after I opened my computer to replug in an internal card reader. I smelled a little burning plastic after plugging it back in but the system booted up just fine, ran for 15-20 minutes before crashing/rebooting.
5. I have a really, really compact shuttle case/motherboard so it's HOT

This happened before, I took it to the shop and the guy took out my old hard drive, placed it in an external drive to 'save' my data but he still lots my desktop/my documents folder. Is there a way to save this, I don't want to spend $ on another external drive.

 

burn smell after opening is never good. could be the board.

 

I think the board seems fine, I can go into bios and there are no error/warning messages. I've fried computers before and i'd rate the burning smell in this situation at 1/10 while ram burning is at 7/10. h:

 

Computer components can be fried by just touching them if ur ungrounded...
hmmmmmm
Or slightly damaged toos

 

pffttt...wives tale

 

Rub ur feet on carpet and then come back to me....
Its happened before.
Now just touch the bare metal case and ur good
Even tho my freind is just putting hardware down on the carpet and so far nothing happens to him... weird.

 

I grounded. Well it can boot to the brink of loading desktop before rebooting. Something missing in the boot file?

Could I boot it from USB key or something, get into windows safe mode, then check the partition?

 

my guess would be that on bootup XP is getting an error. And because XP is set to restart on errors, the the thing just dies. Try safe mode, and try to restore last good settings.

 

nope, ESD is a real problem, but only a few components are succeptible.

 

get a program like partition magic and see if it can detect it.