Recently my computer has had some boot problems. My screen saver froze and I had to press the restart button. When restarting Windows did not load and it said it couldn't find the boot file. Then it said that there was a hdd error. When trying to boot from the cd-rom it goes through the set up process and then it doesn't detect the hard drive. It did this the other day, but when I turned the power off and then on again a few hours later, I was able to restore to the last good configuration. Not so this time. Can anyone help me? I am having to use my neighbor's computer! Thanks

Do you have a boot floppy? Any os version will for for testing....a Win98 boot disk is fast and includes CD-rom drivers and other utilities...but if you have your file system as NTFS, the utils won't do much. Is your HDD still detected in CMOS? If not, check your cables..You could have bad cables, power supply, memory, or *GASP* HDD. You have to use process of elimination to narrow down the culprit....if all of these are ok, then you're stuck with a software issue. Sometimes, as in my case, you could have your CPU overheating.....check to see that the thermal paste hasn't burned up...if so, then put some on it. Before I get too far into it, let me know what you've done and what you've found. My email is tannoo@msn.com.

hello: how old is hard disc? over 2-3 years its time to replace it, also you do not have enough ram, 256 barely makes xp work and when you waste ram with screen savers it makes life tough for the o/s to swap out to disc and makes file corruption more probable, also put the hard disc as primary master and the cd as primary slave , (both on same cable). trouble shooting is an art and takes patience and never give up !! .........neil