As of now my problem might be solved, described below.
Today I went to my IT department, got some advice that was moderately
helpful, but mostly to "buy a new computer." I have a Dell XPS that is
4 -- 5 years old, 3.2 GHz. Pentium IV, 1 GB DDRAM, internal SATA
drives. They said that Windows XP Home has no Administrative Tools, but
I know that I have used it many times.
When I came back home, Administrative Tools worked -- nothing that I
did -- and it reported the non-bootable internal hard drive that I
reformatted as healthy (it had suddenly become unformatted). Then I
tried to restore from backup the data lost on that drive, but Driveimage
couldn't do it because the drive couldn't be locked. After much
frustration, I noticed that Driveimage has an "ignore" button, so
clicking on this started an long list of red warning messages that this
action is dangerous. Finally, Driveimage restored all the data and
everything seemed OK.
Then I tried to burn a DVD using ImgBurn and it couldn't because the DVD
burner couldn't be locked (the same problem that Driveimage had with
locking the internal hard drive). Taskmanager couldn't terminate
ImgBurn nor could it force a reboot. I used MS Process Explorer to find
that ImgBurn had two instances of ImgBurn running that Taskmanager
couldn't see. I used PE to terminate the processes for ImgBurn. Still
couldn't burn, so then I forced a reboot by using the off switch on the
computer. After the computer rebooted, everything appears OK and DVD
burned.
Any comments? Could the (nonbootable) hard drive be near to failure?
Next, try to solve the networking problem (thank you all very much for
you generous help).
===========
I'm the one that is trying to network my computers thru Zone Alarm.
New problem now, maybe related to networking attempts?
Internal hard drive (not boot drive) reported unformatted, don't know
why. I reformatted, then tried to restore data from backup using
Driveimage. Could not restore because drive could not be locked by
Driveimage. Thinking that maybe I had to create a partition on the
reformatted drive, I discovered that there are no administrative tools
on the computer. The Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools window
is blank. I'm now thinking that this is the reason that the disk
can't be locked.
Right now I am backing up the boot drive and thinking that I need to
do a Windows XP Home repair from the CD.
Is there a better plan?
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