hai! i have an AMD Duron 700 MHz 128MB RAM 10 Gig HD and a Windows ME OS... about last week, i installed adobe stuff and macromedia stuff into my computer, and a day after that, the PC started goin crazy. it keeps on crashing and crashing, and if i restart my computer, it will say: ........... Primary Master Disk = none Primary Slave Disk = none Sec. Master Disk = CDROM, UDMA 99 Sec. Slave Disk = none Boot from Atapi CD-ROM failure... DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER ............. i can't believe it.. where'd my hard drive go??? so out of fustration, i turn the computer off.. and a few hours after that, i turn it on again, and it just runs perfectly.. except for the scan disk which now takes like forever to scan... some things i've noticed before my PC freezes/crashes: 1. if i play multimedia stuff like music and videos 2. if i leave the PC too long 3. usually after 30 minutes of use, it will freeze to death 4. i hear this *clicking* sounds inside the PC, but i dont know if its my HD or something else just before the darn thing crashes... i really hope you could help me guys... thanks

The clicking sound could be a cooling fan beginning to fail, causing the computer to overheat. Good idea to open the case up and clean everything with compressed air, and make sure the fans spin freely.

did you run a thorough scandisk and see if it finds any bad sectors/clusters. if it does, its time to use your warranty, or pick up a new hard drive. get the diag disk from your hard drive makers site and run it also except skip the write test unless you have everything you want backed up.

well, actually, i did the scan disk, but it takes like forever to scan.. there was one time, when i scanned it, it kept going over and over again, saying that it cannot continue because some programs are running... but there's no program running except for scan disk itself... and i also keep on getting these blue screens that says, unable to write to drive C and stuff like that... its so annooying! so what seems to be the problem? my HD? my cooling fan? my ME? or perhaps, a virus? ...

the clicking is a sign that the hd is failing, probably ,anyway. make a win-me bootdisk boot with it in a: then at a: type scandisk c: and then run a thorough scan when prompted. it will still seem like it takes a long time to run, but thats how it goes. if you know someone with norton utilities 2001 borrow that and run diskdoctor from the cd, and while your at it run windoctor. also if you haven't converted to fat32 that can sometimes solve fat16 problems. boot with a win-me startup disk at a: type cvt c: this will launch the fat32 converter.

I just had this exact problem with my system. It started after I downloaded some CD Burner software off of Morpheus. Anyhow, things started to go really slow, and then it would freeze up. I finally let it run ScanDisk, and it found about 30 bad sectors at like 48%. So I got it back up and running, made my backup disk, went to Staples and bought me a 20G hard drive (5400 rpm, I have a older system)for $89.00 and I am in the process of installing XP on it. I had to make a bootdisk for XP off my laptop, to get it to partition, formatt, ect. But, it seems to have fixed the problem. Hope this helps! P.S. I leave the sides off my computer at all times to aviod overheating. Some don't agree with my practice, but I have never had any complications. Just blow it out every month or so with the canned air to get rid of dust bunnies!