Over the weekend just gone when I logged on and my machine had finished booting up I tried to access ‘my documents’ files. Message said could not be found. When I looked at my drive icon on my desktop it had a whit question mark in a red circle over it. I switched of in the usual way and logged backed on again. This time drive was ok. Last night logged on and the question mark was not over my drive but on my DVD/CD drive. Did not reboot. Carried out a full system scan. No errors. Switched off. Did not have time to look at it this morning.. WHAT is going on do you think? Machine has not been moved nor had the side off in a long time. Just showing this sign. ?????

Could be something as simple as a loose or bad IDE cable. Try re-seating all the cables, cards and RAM. Exercise proper electro-static precautions. If you haven't opened the case in a long time then you need to blow out the dust anyway. DO NOT use a vacuum on the computer. You can buy canned compressed air at computer or office supply stores. This is a dirty job so you may want to do it outside. Don't forget to blow out the power supply from both ends too.

I will give it a go.....do you recon that is all it could be...no sign of anything then about to give up on me.....and as for the cacuum is it because it is too strong? Thanks

The reason you shouldn't use a vacuum cleaner is because they can create static electricity, which is harmful to electronic components. I have never seen anything like you described.

OK cleaned and checked all leads. Fine. logged on and still have question mark over my dvd/cd drive. Can still load and run disk but have not tried to record to dvd yet. Plays cd's fine. So what is causing it?

I haven't seen a question mark so I took a shot at it. I thought that might be the problem because you said it also happened on the hard drive. Is the computer booting to the hard drive consistently now? If so, the question mark may have something to do with the fact that WinXP can't natively write to DVD media. You need to have a third party program for that. You may have gotten one with your drive. Nero and Roxio are the two major players. There are also some freeware burning programs. Do you have any burning software installed?

Well when it first happened the question mark was over my G drive. this is extra drive I have. then next time it was over the DVD drive. Now today I have switched on all seems clear. will it happen agin I ask myself. As for boot up sequence is floopy drive....CD drive....then C drive....there is nothing of course in floopy or CD drives.