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operating system not found

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harvf16

Technical User
Feb 7, 2003
2
US
While working in MS Word, system locked up and after a reboot "operating system not found", does this just require a reload from os disk, or a reformat of the hard drive....thanks
 
Could be either one of these, and possibly a replacement hard drive.
You need to do the diagnostics from the ground up, specifically from the BIOS on. Ed Fair
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.
 
Well not much to go on, but lets see what we can do. First what make is your hard drive? If it is a Western Digital, then you will want to download WDDIAG from thier site on another computer if you have the resources to do so.

Once you do then follow the instructions for making the disk and pop it in the A: drive and boot and run the Diagnostics. If all comes up ok then try a reload from the OS Disk. Possible that the MBR may have become corrupted.

If it errors out while trying to reload then it is possible that you may need to do a format with erasing the MBR of the drive. The re-installation may be very unstable and the MBR could be holding corrupt data if you do not wipe it completely.

There is a great utility for that and it is free called Ranish Partition Manager. You should be able to find this on the site


Hope this helps. If you have files you need before doing any restore use a boot disk and then copy what you need to floppies or if connected to a network use a network boot floppy to copy the files.
 
Hard Drive diagnostics is where I would start also. Maxtor do a diagnostic programme for ALL HDD called PowerMax which runs from a floppy. If all is OK, I'd try a reload of the OS as an overlay. Regards
Phil
A friend will help you move.
A REAL friend will help you move a body!
 
This may be a virus, did you have updated anti-virus software installed? if not there is a virus that moves the MBR to a different place and points to it until a predetermined amount of time happens then all of a sudden it tells you that you don't have an OS installed, try getting a friend to make anti-virus recovery disks for you, this boot to them and see if it fixes the problem, also make sure you use brand new disks and make sure your friend has the most recent anti-virus definitions.

James Holloway
Web Design of Oklahoma, LLC
Web pages for beginners
 
Try this .
Start up with your Boot disc or Startup disk in ( without cd rom support )
At the A: prompt , type , sys c: and then press ENTER.

Take out the boot disk & restart your computer.
 
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