Whenever I start up my pc, the message "Clinet Mac Addr 00 0C 76 13 81 something something" followed by a string of "F"s with hyphons between them show along with the message:
"PXE_E53: No file boot disk"

Shows up. This has never happened before. It also goes to the same screen when the anti-virus reaches a certain point. So uh, is this a virus? Have I been hacked/cracked/whatever and if so, any suggestions on what to do about it? Or is it simply that there's some file or something missing from my pc?

Please help,
Cheers in advance,

CD.

You haven't been hacked at all so don't worry about that. The problem is with your boot sequence. Your computer is trying to boot up from you network card which naturally isn't possible. Enter the bios on boot up and check that the boot order is set to HDD, Floppy, CDRom.
My favourite is Floppy, CDRom, HDD but play around with them til the error goes away. If it still doesn't go away post up again and I'll try to help out more.

Its odd that it would reset the sequence without the user doing anything, though. And odder that it would change to a sequence beginning with the network card, home users are virtually never equpped to boot from the network so the BIOS wouldnt be rigged to default to it.

Which leads me to suspect that the hard drive has died. The machine tries to boot from HDD, fails, and then goes on in the sequence till it hits the network, which also fails.

Thanks guys, I'll do just that [img]smile.gif[/img]

That sounds suspiciously like a non-boot disk in your floppy drive while you started the computer... Always look for the simple solutions first. Even if it isn't what's wrong, you'll be happy the times you check and it IS what's wrong.

There's nothing in the A drive though, and the cd drive was set to bootup first. :\. I tried restoring defaults but I still get this error.

I'll go with Andrewas. Since it references a MAC address, that tells me there's a network card in there somewhere. You probably don't want it going there... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Head to www.trendmicro.com for an on-line full scan and see what pops up.