Hi All, I’m new on this forum yes and you guessed I’m here because I’ve got a problem with my laptop. I did do a search and there are a lot of people with OS systems that won’t boot I didn’t see any with the same problem that I got. There is a lot of information to give you so I’ll start. I have a Dell Inspiron 1100 which I bought new. I replaced the hard drive a little over a year ago. I have 512 mb of ram. I shut the computer down two nights ago with a normal shut down. When I tried to boot the computer yesterday it wouldn’t boot! I get the Windows logo and then I get the bios screen which also has a F2 and an F12 (no F8) option on the upper right side of the screen. The screen then goes dark with a blinking curser on the upper left side. A little history is needed here. I put the driver and utility CD in and then choose the F12 option during the boot sequence. I told the computer to boot off the CD. I then ran the diagnosis test. I choose the symptom tree to be precise. I did two diagnostics one for “unable to find the OS” and the other for “unable to boot”. The results for both tests were, all elements passed. This is the third time this has happen to me in just a little over a year. The first time this happened I suspected I’d lost the hard drive. Well I really wanted a bigger hard drive anyway so I bought a new hard drive and reloaded the OS. The second time this happened was just six months ago. This time my antivirus program (McAfee Total Protection) had done a scan of my hard drive the night before I shut the computer down normally and just like now it wouldn’t reboot the next time I tried to get on. I called around to see if anyone had ever heard of an antivirus program causing this and no one had so I just reformatted the hard drive and reloaded the OS again. (From this point on every time the McAfee wanted to do scan I wouldn’t let it) Well that bring me up to date; as I stated above I did shut the computer down with a normal shutdown however this was after it had been on for two days. For all I know it may have done a scan without my knowledge. I now suspect I have a piece of hardware going bad but I don’t where to start looking. I just want to reload the OS, there is obviously something going on here that I don’t understand. I want to fix this problem not just put a band-aid on it. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks, Carol

I should have said I've made no changes in my system for several months. Thanks again, Carol

My suggestion is to try again and trash McAfee. Piece of crap.