Hello Everyone, I've got a problem and there's some urgency with it. I've got a pc, it's an older dell p4 2.4 ghz I think running xp home. It's no longer booting. It was working fine yesterday afternoon and was powered down. On next power up last night there were no errors on the screen, but the box didn't boot the only thing was a cursor thingy at the top left of the screen. I checked cables, they're all in tight, checked the primary drive I am 50 50 on whether it's getting power it feels like it might be, but i'm not 100% certain. I unplugged it's drive cable and restarted the box it complained immediately that the primary master had been removed. I plugged it back in and said error went away, but no other errors came up indicating that the system detected another issue with the drive. Two reasons i'm very worried about this drive are: 1 I don't think it's been backed up and there's files that are only on this drive, and 2 I don't have another internal hard disk to use with the box. I do have an external ntfs formatted terrabyte drive USB that I can use. Last time I looked there were not any speech accessible windows live CD options that were out there, has this changed? If not, a Linux option would be welcome. I need to get speech then find out if the drive is responding and possibly repair it, a suggestion was made that the mbr could have got corrupted, I do not see how but I don't have any other ideas. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks. Dave.