OT: Computer's...gotta hate 'em.

[Thermodyne]

WTF did you format it? Didn’t you know that it would wipe your drive?

Classic case of “I can fix this” fubars a rig.

You should have done a repair to the boot loader. Stick an XP cd in and select repair from the menu. Actually you shouldn’t have been aborting the startup-shutdown process, then you wouldn’t have hose’d the boot loader. If your stuffs worth $500 and a month without the drive, send it off and have it recovered. Then spend $9.95 on an XP book and read up on the errors of your ways. XP does a ton of house keeping during the shutdown process, maintaining the boot files being part of this. This was user error, not a windows flaw.

Get a copy of Ghost and do some backup images. That way you can always reset to a previous state.