2.8 Ghz Celeron
1.5 GB RAM
128 MB AGP video card (this is not on board, but there IS an onboard card)
160GB IDE hard drive
CD-RW drive
XP Professional
That is about all I can tell you about my system off-hand. My system was running fine until about 4 days ago. I was logged into World of Warcraft and Ventrilo and I went afk for a few minutes. When I came back, I had been booted out of the game and vent, and my screen was frozen. So I rebooted my computer, and once it got past the normal boot up screens, I received an error message. I don't remember the exact message, but it was something along the lines of "Windows is missing the so-and-so file and cannot load". So I pop in my XP cd and reboot the computer. It goes through reading the hardware and comes to the formatting the drive screen. After I select the drive, it begins to format, and at 100% I get the error message: "Setup was unable to format drive C. The hard disk may be damaged. Make sure the disk is on and properly connected. If the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI devices are properly terminated. See your computer or SCSI adapter documentation for more information." That's word for word. So I think my hard drive is damaged, and I go out and buy a new hard drive. I install the drive, put in my disc, reboot, go through the formatting process again...and get the same message, from a brand new drive. So now I think that maybe my XP disc is damaged. So I get a new disk, put it in, along with my old hard drive, and boot up my computer. I go through the formatting, and get the same mesage. So I take out my old hard drive, put in the new one, and using the new disk, boot up, go through the formatting, and once again, get the same message. At this point I am running out of ideas. I'm talking to my friends, and one of them suggests that it might be something I need to adjust in my BIOS. So I go into BIOS and revert everything back to optimized, reboot, go through the formatting, and get the same error message. Another friend suggests that it might be the cables connecting the hard drive. So I pull the cable out of another computer (one that has rarely, if ever, had parts removed), hook the new cable up to my hard drive, reboot, format, and same error message. I have removed and replaced the RAM and processor, and done absolutely everything I can think of, and I keep getting the same error message. I am out completely out of ideas, and if anyone has any thoughts or knows what my problem is, I would be extremely grateful for any help you can give me.
