The MBR should survive a common format. But that shouldn't be a problem here. The error is unlikely to be found in the MBR.

The latest......after taking the advice of DoG I manually entered ip number and etc, now I can connect to other computers on the network. For some reason if I try to ping an address as in "www.aol.com" I get "ping request could not find host www.aol.com". While if I ping an ip address of someone's ftp (my son's) it gives sent = 4; recieved = 4; lost = 0 (0% loss) although I can NOT connect to his ftp at all with software but change computers and can connect. I think formatting may be in order.

Thanks
Dudelive

aol like many others block PING ;)

Oh yeah I understand that, but if you open a cmd window and ping w*w.aol.com, you will at least get something was sent and recieved. Look back at the picture above and what is circled should be the ip number that just got pinged. I have never seen this before and just want to know what it is so if it happenes again, I or someone else can fix it quickly without formating.

Thanks
Dudelive