Opertaing System not found - Drive Crash?

[kevotron]

I am working on a system that will not boot -it powers up and and all the IDE drives (hard drive on one channel, cd and burner on other) show up in BIOS -- when it goes to load the OS it says "operating system not found". I tried to boot from the BartPE emergency boot disk, it starts to boot laods the Bart splash screen and then just hangs--you can move the mouse and all, but it just sits there with the BartPE boot screen and does nothing. HELP! Any ideas? Here is the system I am working with:

Xi® MTower™ 2P64
Based on the newest and most revolutionary, 64 bit AMD Opteron™ processor, sporting 16x16 HyperTransport™ interface with 1MB (1024KB) multi-way associative L2 Cache & independent integrated DDR RAM Controller. The motherboard, based on the AMD 8111/8151™ chipset, supporting 2 processors and AGP-PRO 8x graphic interface. The HyperTransport interface allows FSB data transfer much faster than previous BUS technologies (>5.8GB/sec.). Expandable to 8GB(16GB Optional) of 400MHz DDR-SDRAM

 

[kevotron]

this same machine boted from an old hard drive with Windows 95--is it safe to assume that it WAS a bad drive then? anyway to know for sure?

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

Did you try downloading the diagnostic program from the hdd manufacturer website and running that on the hdd to see if there was a problem??

Murray

 

[edfair]

Can be viral related. Can be driver related if you have an overlay. Do the diagnostic, and if no problem is found do a zero fill and try reloading the OS.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[ski]

Primary causes:

(1)The BIOS does not detect the HD.
Check that the Primary(IDE 1) controller is enabled in BIOS, the HD's cables are securely connected, connect the HD to the secondary(IDE 2) channel, install a different known working IDE cable, and connect a different power lead.

(2)Sector 0 of the physical hard disk drive has a corrupt Master Boot Record (MBR).
(3)An incompatible partition is marked as Active.
(4)A partition that contains the MBR is no longer active.
These 3 require starting from the boot CD, but if you cannot boot from yours, then these may not be the cause.

(5)The HD is damaged.
If BIOS detects the HD, or if BIOS does not detect the HD and the suggestions in (1) do not fix things, then the HD may be dead.

 

[kevotron]

OK I I am going to try these suggestions and see if it is indeed a dead drive. thanks all!

 

[kevotron]

yes the drive is dead as per the Western Digital Drive diagnostic disk. Thanks to all for the help.

 

[garebo]

Just one thing more. Western digital hard drives are notorious in that you have to be very careful with the jumper selection you have chosen. There is a different jumper selection if there is only one hard drive, a different selection if there are 2 hard drives on the same ide cable, and even a different selection if the other hard drive is not a western digital brand. Just thought i would point that out as it has helped me and others in the past, right here at this forum!
thanks