I need some technical advice regarding computer repairs — I’ll spare everyone the details, but if you’re a computer geek or an IT pro and are feeling merciful, please read on.

My box is an AMD dual processor with 2 GBs of RAM and and two 300GB hard drives. It’s a few years old and has seen heavy use. It was left on for a couple of days and now it won’t boot, instead it gives me the following error:

IDE Channel 1 no 80 Conductor cable
Floppy disk(s) fail (40)

Any idea what exactly the problem might be (bad cable?) and/or the best way to fix this in the DC metro area? Thanks for your charity… you can click on my name above to find my email.