I have an HP Pavilion 8240 that I upgraded to Win2K from Win 98. Every so often, the bootup stops at the system check with grinding noise coming from the hard drive for a minute or so, followed by the screen message "Operating System Not Found" I can get over this by rebooting the system constantly until it skips this hurdle and gets on to the win2000 logon. any suggestions? mukund

The sound could be rapid reciprocation of the stepper motor in the read/write mechanism in the hard drive while it searches for files. Or it could be mechanical damage, but that is less likely if the system runs OK sometimes. There may be bad sectors on the drive: it could be a boot sector virus or virus checker preventing it finding the system files. You could run an error check of the disk - right click on the drive icon in My Computer - properties - Tools etc. If you boot from a Win98 boot floppy and type fdisk.mbr that should settle the master boot record. Check to see if you have boot sector virus checking in BIOS setup and if is, whether or not it is enabled. If it were my disk I would probably do those things then reformat the drive and make a fresh installation.