I have a Dell Dimension 4300 1.5 ghz with 256 meg of memory running WXP Pro with bios ver A02. Last night my son was playing a game and the machine locked up. We tried CTL-ALT-DEL but no task manager came up. So we powered the machine off. When it came back up, I got this message: No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility After some time I was finally able to boot from the Windows CD and copy folders off the hard drive (I wondered if the hard drive was going out). Everything seemed fine. I deleted some things off the hard drive and went to bed running defrag. Got up this morning and same message was shown, which apparently popped up sometime during the night. Could this be: 1. CMOS battery failure? Seems odd that the machine would lock and the clock is still keeping track of date and time. 2. Bad memory? 3. Hard drive problem? Maybe, but I'm able to use it once I get the machine booted up. TIA for the help.

Not likely to be batt/mem and hopefully not a physically failing HD. Go into BIOS and ensure that the HD is correctly listed and is the first boot device. If so, you may need to set CD as first boot. Boot on XP CD, go into repair console and run fixboot and/or fixmbr. If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

Could be the hard drive is getting flakey. Not sure what Dell provides for troubleshooting, but usually on hard drive manufacturer's sites they have diagnostic utilities that will thouroughly check out the drive. Is it still under warranty? Then contact Dell. One thing to do (if you haven't) is in "My Computer" right-click on the drive and go to Properties. then click on the Tools tab. In "Error-checking" click "Check Now". Then check both boxes. When you click Start, it will most likey say it cannot do it now, would you like to do it next time it reboots. Answer yes. Reboot the computer and log in with the same ID. Prepare to wait (maybe 30-60 minutes for a 60-80GB drive) because it will check each sector on the disk and flag the bad ones so they won't be used. WILL POST FOR FOOD.