hi, i am having trouble again... my computer goes past the Dell bios screen and then i get a black screen.... tried booting from cd, i get the "press any key to boot from cd" so i press a key and still get a black screen!! it was working fine about 4-5 hours ago and all i did was turned it on, put music on my mp3 and turned it off!!!!
Mike

Edit- i tried the 20GB laptop drive and got a stop errer code so decided to try a clean install (it boots fron the disk with the laptop drive but not my normal drive!!)

i will put my 40GB in as slave when xp is installed and tell you what happens. i dont want to lose all my 800 songs and i cant get them off my mp3 player because they are changed to ".mp3.SAT" extensions, if you delete the .SAT, the file becomes invalid.

the computer boots ok with the laptop drive and the 40 gig HD is recognised as a slave drive so i'm backing up all my music to my mp3 player (copy and paste)

i will try booting from my 40 gig HD again tomorrow.

I see you've already started backing up your music.

Sometimes major issues can creep up so you are wise to back up important files, especially with the symptoms you described. I lost important data once before. I now use StompSoft's http://www.stompsoft.com/pc-backup/pc-backup.html I'm pretty pleased with the results, and I needed something to ease my mind. This product is definitely something to consider both for routine backups or when you run into a problem like you described.

yup, but i lost it when i tried to install windows to my HDD mp3!!

turned out it was the IDE cable