Last week my computer started to show a screen that said "Hard drive 1 not found" and "Hard drive 0 not found." The first tech had me go to run and put in "prefetch". That seemed to work. Then the message came back. The second tech said it was a hard drive issue, and had a tech come out and replace  my hard drive (that was very fast service by the way). Everything worked for a few hours. I went to install XP Service pack 2, but it would not download. I tried putting the drivers back in, starting with the chip set. It said to click on "Open", but that was in light type and would not work, and could only save to disk. The Task Manager was showing the CPU usage as 100% with no fluctuation. That is what I had before the new hard drive, and I am thinking, "Oh oh".  I went to Device Manager, Hardware, and there was an exclamation point next to the Bios saying it could not be found. In the meantime, I was unable to get the screen saver to come on, and then all of the Icons I had, such as IE, Ad Aware, changed and would not open. Instead of the icon, each was a white box with a blue boarded blue box with little images in it. So I lost that. Then I could not get Systems to open, nor display or anything else. I emailed Dell and was told that they would send someone out to replace my mother board. So my questions are these: 1. Has anyone experienced the same problems? 2. What do I have to do after my new mb is installed? 3. Does this sound like a mb problem? Luckily my warrenty expires next November.

 

Dell 8300 bought in 2003, so no recovery disk.

Thanks to all who respond or laugh.