Hello Everybody, I was looking for help for my brother's computer. He DOWNLOADED something and made his computer CRASH. When he turned it back on, an error message regarding "0 active partitions" would pop up. It then says "Strike F1 to continue or F2 for setup utilities". I checked the boot sequence in the system utilities and it said that the on board IDE hard drives wasn't present. The computer model is a Dell Dimension 4700 and I saw something similar like this when I was searching the forums but that issue was caused by hardware problems due to user repairs. I haven't opened the computer yet but... any ideas hy u will have to open the comp the idea is it may be a boot virus so 1st step i would suggest is reset bios and memory and check in bios weather the hdd is detected if not then you mbr is gone you can try and recover it or fix it using DM Disk Manager downloadable at segate site, but if you mbr is gone then there is no garuntee you will recover the data. i worked for dell they do have something called pre loaded ghost check with dell CALLCENTER if you are still in warrenty if not then you will have to REINSTALL the os.again circa the expert got it right :-P.