Operating System Not Found?

[Don79]

Hi Guys,

The president of our company gave me her home computer to fix. When I turn on the machine, the HP startup screen shows. Then, a black screen with "Operating System Not Found". Any ideas? Bad HD? Please advise

 

[mot98]

Try booting with a bootdisk. See what is on the HD. Sounds like you may have to do a re-install.

Hope this helps... mot98..

"Where's the beer?"

 

[crisc]

The PC is not finding a boot sector to load an OS. Usually this means that no OS is installed. Did your president give you anything more to go on than just "fix my computer?" Try booting from a startup disk and see if there are any files or directories on the C: drive. If there aren't, or you can't even access C: then he/she may have "accidentally" formatted the drive.

 

[Don79]

This is what comes up when I boot from a boot disk and select option 2(Without CD ROM Support):

Windows 98 has detected that drive C dose not contain a valid FAT of FAT32 partition. Possible causes

1) The drive may need to be partitioned
2) You may be using 3rd party disk partitioning software. Remove Emergency Boot Disk and restart computer.
3) Some viruses also cause your drive C to not register.

I ran scandisk, it said everything is fine.
Diagnostics loaded to drive c.

At the a prompt, i typed sys c: , it said invalid function.

I tried fdisk, it said no fixed disks present.

Any ideas? If It comes to reformatting, anyone have notes on this? I haven't done it in a long while! Also have to look around for my WIN 98 CD!

Thanks.

 

[Don79]

I believe the HD is shot. Saw Virtual Drive C somewhere?

 

[edfair]

Or it has a partition that 98 can't see. Like 2K or XP maybe. An older fdisk might see it as non-dos. Or the drive is gone. Is it turning? Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Don79]

Well, when I press ENTER when the NO OS found message appears, the computer makes this kinda rattling typewriter sound. This must be the HD? Not sure..

 

[thatrenowned]

That message you get about drive C not containing a valid FAT\FAT32 partition pops up probably because the drive is formatted using NTFS. 98 boot disks can't read these types of drives.

What you need to do is create an NT boot disk. I'm not fully sure on how to do this, but if you search back through the threads, or look on some of the 'Forums Experts' FAQs, I'm sure you'll find it. Once you have one, you should be able to boot into DOS, backup some files and then restore the computer.

Alternatively, you may be able to put in an NT CD and select repair. Only thing with this is you'll need the Emergency Repair Disk which I'm guessing you don't have. Hmmm...

In fact, I would say the best thing to do is take the HDD out of the computer and put it into another NT machine as slave. This way, the NT machine will boot up and pick the other HDD from which you'll be able to backup the info more efficiently (then wipe and reinstall).

If it is infact not an NT machine, try putting the disk in a 98 machine and backup.

The rattling suggests a dodgy hard disk, so work fast!

Anyway, I could be wrong on all this, but I'm just writing what I'm thinking as I go along. It would be worth getting more info off your boss and posting back here. Info to get is what OS, when the problem started, any software recently installed etc...

Rgds

 

[Kjonnnn]

Did this machine have NT on it?

If it did in may be looking for the ntldr file or boot.ini.

If you've got that OS as work copy the nrldr file.

If your boss just want to u wipe it clean, make a start up disk for a w98 machine (in control panel, add/remov software).

FDISK the drive with the boot disk, THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING>... REPARTION THE DRIVE. Then you can format it.

 

[KarveR]

If fdisk returns the error NO HARD DISKS PRESENT it means the HD is F****D.

FDISK *WILL* tell you if you have NTFS EXT2 EXT3 FAT16 or FAT32 drives IF they can be located.

The "Diagnostics loaded to drive c." message will occur as this is a "RAM DRIVE" a virtual device created using RAM strangely... This will be allocated the first available fixed disk drive letter, normall on a machine with a working HD this will be D:.
As this loaded to C it would also indicate that the startup disk coulod not find a hard disk either.

Check that the BIOS can or cannot see the drive, (even if it can it doesn't mean the drive actually works).

Buy a new HD and reinstall. ***************************************
Party on, dudes!

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Either the HD OR the HD controller is dead/dying.

Try the disk in another machine before replacing it.

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk