I setup a 233 mhz computer for someone and put windows ME on it. They gave it back to me saying it had a cluster error and that scandisk would freeze up after a certain percentage. I ran a western digital diagnostic on it and it said error 0208, smart status failed after media scan... replace drive. I put another western digital hard drive in it. I believe it made a pop sound when it started up, I'm not sure. I tried to run a format from a windows startup floppy to erase the hard drive. After the format it was saying trying to recover allocation units with like 3 numbers separated by comments, changing like heads and sectors.... It did this for a while and then stopped and said format failed. So I guess the computer is ruining the hard drives. I don't know if a Virus will do this, it'd have to be in the circuit boards, memory, bios or something cause I completely removed the old hard drive before I put the other one in. The only other thing I can think of is that something electrical in it is ruining the hard drives but I don't know why or how. If there is a virus somewhere in the computer is there a diagnostic that can find it, are there only some places it could be? If it's a virus or if it's hardware, can the problem be isolated and fixed? If I did take it to someone could they fix it without basically replacing the motherboard or something? I'm not sure what's going on with it. thank you for any help Robert Kupferer _________________________________________________________________ Get MSN 8 and enjoy automatic e-mail virus protection. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine Visit our web site to signup: http://freepctech.com