This problem only happens maybe once every 100 times the computer starts, so it is very rare when it happens. I have a Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB Hard Drive. Basically all the computer says is that there is nothing to boot from, and asks me to hit F1 (I think it is F1 I cannot remember) to retry boot, I hit it and it still does not work. So I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and it starts up fine. I am thinking that this may of happened because I was doing Updates on my computer that required for it to be shut off, It shut off 100% fine, than like two seconds later I turned it back on, that is when the problem happened. Come to think about it I once heard somebody say that you needed to give the computer 30 seconds before you turned it back on, but this was way back in the 286 days, when computers had like a 30MB hard Drive and that seemed big a the time, anyways has anyone heard of this problem before? Thank you, your help is very much appreciated Jesse My Maxed Out Pentium 4! Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 HT Extreme Edition @ 3.2GHz 4GB DDR Ram 1.0 TB SATA II Drive Western Digital Caviar Black 24'' HP Full 1080P Monitor Windows V

Have you tried a BIOS update? Once upon a time the floppy disk was king.

The sad thing about that is I have the latest Bios for that machine, the A12 version, and that was release like in 2004 or 2005. Jesse My Maxed Out Pentium 4! Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 HT Extreme Edition @ 3.2GHz 4GB DDR Ram 1.0 TB SATA II Drive Western Digital Caviar Black 24'' HP Full 1080P Monitor Windows V

When the drive is detected is it identified by both the model and FULL capacity in the start up screens?

If this is only happening in the morning when it's kinda cool, it might be a poor connection. Try reseating the hard drive power cable and the ribbon cable at both ends. For what it's worth to XP users: When you click on the 'Command Prompt' you are just causing the 'Command prompt' to be displayed. This prompt gives you access to the 'NT Virtual DOS Manager'.