Missing the System.INI file?

Go here and follow the directions if you are missing the system ini file in your registry

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q132008/

How does a hard drive work?

The hard drive has one or more platters that look like disks and can spin up to 10,000 rotations per minute. An arm with heads are able to read, write or wipe the drive. The heads are the small needles that are capable of writing in binary on the platters. The platters have tracks that are similar to the ones on a vinyl record. Identical tracks on either side of one platter are called cylinders. The tracks are organized into sectors. All information is written to the top of the platter sector by sector. A sector is 512 bytes in size. Sector numbering starts at 1.
Cylinder X Heads X Sectors X 512 = The capacity of the drive. (How ever many gigabytes it is)
The size of the drive is always less than the actual size drive. It is rounded down.

What is binary?

This is computer language. Each character you see on this screen has a binary number code that tells the computer to translate it into the character you see. Each character consist of 8 bits. Each of the 8 bit numbers can be either a 1 or a 0. This is the smallest fragment of the logistics of computer language. For example:
What you see "D"
What the computer sees "01000100"
http://asciitable.com has the table of how this works and what other character codes are.

How to get to the device manager

If you have a MY COMPUTER icon on your desktop, right click on it with your mouse and go to properties. You may have to go to the hardware tab to be able to find the device manager. The device manager will show you all your hardware. You can also install hardware through this device. Normally if a device is not recognized, it will have a yellow question mark and label it as unknown.

The difference between an logical and physical drive

The physical drive is the actual hard ware that you can touch. The logical drive is the a partition on the physical drive that allows you to save your media in readable form.