I have a 2.0GHz, P4, 512 MB Ram with WinME installed.

Most of the time I can boot the computer up jsut fine but now and then I get a pure balck screen that says at the top "Drive not ready - System Halted."

Exatly what is causing this and can I fix it? sometime have to boot four tiems to actually get windows going.

could be severl problems so it will be a hit and miss.
When the bios program tries to read the hdd it can not find one thats ready to go, there for gives the error message.

1) hdd is going bad - go to manufactures web site and down load their hdd test utility

2) hdd is just slow - there may be a cmos setting to allow a wait period befor hdd access.

3)cmos battery getting weak- replace battery

I'm sure there are other posiblilitis :(

cmos? What is that, and where would i find that battery?

I hope it isnt' the hdd going bad, already had to replace one hdd this year on another computer.

Where is this headache causing battery loacated? On the motherboard itself?

Its on the mobod about size of a half dollor. When it does boot check the time and date, if they are correct boattery is likely good.

the cmos or bios is normaly referred os the same thing , one gets into the routine to change things is when it first starts to run post systems checks is to press ,depending on comp, delete, F1,or some other key.

Well time is correct and so is the date. I was hoping it was the CMOS battery.

Just looked at the BIOS settings and for soem reason it was set to boot form teh CDROM first, I changed it to Hard drive first, should this help?

One never knows for sure till its tried.
Would still download hdd utility program and test the hdd.
Does the BIOS setting have a boot delay setting , if so try different delays.

check if the harddrive is properly attached both the harddrive and motherboard side.