The subject says it all. Was given a five year old Dell, 1.5 ghz. Added a user account for myself, with administrator rights. Deleted one old account, no problem. Deleted the second old account, and the system locked up. On reboot, got message to press F1 to retry boot, or F2 for setup. Went into setup, and saw that the system doesn't see either the C drive, or either of the CD drives. Used a set of 6 XP Floppy Boot DISKS, which worked fine, but because the system could not see the hard drive, could not LOAD Recovery CONSOLE, or do anything else. Would appreciate any HELP from anyone on this matter.Try unplugging/reseating the IDE cable...
Replace it if this doesn't work... they do go bad.Thanks for the suggestion - I'll try this later today and post the results. Anyone else out there have any suggestions?For Patio: As you suggested, I removed the hard drive, detached both the POWER and the data cables, waited a couple of minutes, reattached the cables and replaced the drive in its bay. Hooked everything back up, and everything booted up as usual. All I can conclude is that there was an electrical surge which resulted in garbage in the data or power path.

At any rate, that problem seems to be solved. Thanks so much for your help.Well done patio, great reply Good to hear it was an easy fix...
I keep a few extra Data cables around just in case...

And Welcome Aboard both of you ! !