recently experienced thi error when starting up windows "...PXE-E61:media test failure, check cable..." event before this happened..was plugged in external usb harddrive, and formating it...which was successful the next day, tried to turn on pc, experienced above problem...any ideas???

Check the BIOS settings...your PC is attempting to boot off a network.

thanks for th reply, I now understand after browsing through the internet,,that the pc when powered on will look for bootable partition on cd/or hard drive in order to load the operation system..in this case, I found out that the person who did the formatting of the external harddrive somehow accidentally formated the local drive (c)..this is why this "pre -boot excution environment" (PXE) error notice appears...cause there is nothing on the hard drive now!!!..so temporary solution,..hooked up a spare hard drive..and reload with os (XP) for him to use pc...while I borrow a data recovery software to retrieve data from the problem hard drive...(oh yeah..that second hard drive was handy..slaved one and the other to put to -master..powered on pc, go to start menu>control panel>performance and maintenance(under category view)>administrative tools>computer management>disk management to view status of hard drives present...in this case the problem hard drive had that full free capacity, the same you will find in a new hard drive/.........comments.???

regarding the boot sequence...tried changing the boot order around...same PXE..error>>>like mentioned previously...on my 2nd response..temporary solution was to fit in the spare hard drive..reload it and installed xp..which is working fine...until a recovery software is found to recover data from the first (problem) hard drive..oh yeah...original boot order was to boot from hard drive first...this was the case with that problem hard drive..and now since that hard drive has been replaced with a spare one...with that same, boot order.it's working perfectly fine...still wating...to confirm whether that first hard drive was indeed formated accidently.... as suspected because this problem happened immediately after the formating of one external hard drive..