I have two Western Digital Hard Drives pulled from two E-machines that had bundled software on them from a retail outlet. Never again!
Both of these drives have been in storage for about a year,,,the PSu and MoBo went bad on both of them.
I have been told that replacing a PSu and MoBo for these would be a waste of time because you would not be able to recover the WindowsXP Home edition on them
You would have problems with the packaged software that came on them also.
I guess this means the software from the retailer and the OEM would prevent this.?
This don't sound right, but i have ran into something like that a few years ago on a Dell machine when we replaced the mother board on it.
Could not get the drive to see the MoBo for some reason.
All i want to do is recover the WinXP edition on the drives to a new machine , or run them from an external posiston if that can be done.
Where would be a good starting place with this?
Suggestion's  for PSu's and Boards would be nice also.
Thanks.

   Power Supplies are generic and so any Power Supply with enough wattage will work.  Replacing a Power Supply will not cause problems with Windows.
   Replacing the Motherboard should not cause much of a problem either.  The eMachines should have come with a Windows sticker that has the serial number.  If Windows detects that there is a different motherboard, the serial number should allow you to do the update.
   To use the Windows XP on the drive, just install the drive with Windows XP on it as the boot drive on a computer and start the computer.  If Windows detects that it is on a different computer, use the serial number to update it.