Hi there everybody! Was hoping some one could point me in the right direction. One of my co-workers has a Compaq Presario 7360 (500 processor, 64K ram) that spit out the following message when she turned it on a couple of days ago:
No Operating System Found.
She brought it up because she was thought maybe one of her kids clicked or unchecked some option they shouldn't have.
I explained that it is pretty difficult to remove the o/s by "accident," and told her to bring it in.
She didn't have anything on the HD that she was worried about recovering, so I started by throwing in a Win 2K disk and booting the pc: No o/s detected.
Thought maybe the hd was fried and somehow interfering with the cdrom, so I opened the case and disconnected the hd. System boots to the Compaq start-up screen, checks the ram, then says "Press any key to boot from cd". I hit the keyboard, Windows 2K loads and ultimately says there's no hard drive and it can't install itself.
Installed a spare hard drive I had, reconnected everything, tried again.
This time the system tells me that there's a disk controller error, but then Win 2K starts, detects the hard drive, asks if I want to install on existing partition or format, formats the hard drive... then says Windows 2K has to reboot and setup will resume on startup - except that instead of "resuming" the whole thing restarts... disk controller error, Win 2K kicking in, detecting the now formatted harddrive, asking if I want to install on existing partition...
Etc.
Did a bunch of research online and discovered that Compaq stores some of it's BIOS info on the hdd... and that I am supposed to be able to download a couple of files off the Compaq site, install them via A: and zooommm - off I go...
Except I can't find the damn files anywhere...
Anyone have any suggestions? Is the BIOS even the problem... ?
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for even reading this far!
~ Kaeri
No Operating System Found.
She brought it up because she was thought maybe one of her kids clicked or unchecked some option they shouldn't have.
I explained that it is pretty difficult to remove the o/s by "accident," and told her to bring it in. She didn't have anything on the HD that she was worried about recovering, so I started by throwing in a Win 2K disk and booting the pc: No o/s detected.
Thought maybe the hd was fried and somehow interfering with the cdrom, so I opened the case and disconnected the hd. System boots to the Compaq start-up screen, checks the ram, then says "Press any key to boot from cd". I hit the keyboard, Windows 2K loads and ultimately says there's no hard drive and it can't install itself.
Installed a spare hard drive I had, reconnected everything, tried again.
This time the system tells me that there's a disk controller error, but then Win 2K starts, detects the hard drive, asks if I want to install on existing partition or format, formats the hard drive... then says Windows 2K has to reboot and setup will resume on startup - except that instead of "resuming" the whole thing restarts... disk controller error, Win 2K kicking in, detecting the now formatted harddrive, asking if I want to install on existing partition...
Etc.
Did a bunch of research online and discovered that Compaq stores some of it's BIOS info on the hdd... and that I am supposed to be able to download a couple of files off the Compaq site, install them via A: and zooommm - off I go...
Except I can't find the damn files anywhere...
Anyone have any suggestions? Is the BIOS even the problem... ?
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for even reading this far!
~ Kaeri