hard drive not detected/no operating system found

[Guest]

friend has emachines pc that says no operating system found when it's booted.
he has not one cd that came with it. tried installing my xp home edition
disc but no hard drives were found on this computer. tried repair instead of
install several times and finally got partition 0, press d to delete this
partition and one other option that i can't recall. was completely lost and
p.o. at this point and shut it down. have never been able to get that screen
back. tried my backup disc i made with 'image for windows' no hd found. tried
several diagnostic tools and got read error loading os, system halted. don't
know what diag. utility i was using at the time. on start up system bios
shadowed, video bios shadowed, it detects atapi cd/rom =samsung
csd-r/rw-sw-248f. will not, under any circumstances boot in safe mode. every
time i boot it it detects cpu intel (r) celeron (r)cpu 2.6 GHz. it also says
254 mg. sys. ram passed-128k cache sram passed. this is all i ever get. one
question i have is this. boot screen says 256mb sys. ram passed, and 128k
cache ram passed, does this mean that it detects my memory that's installed
but doesn't detect my hard drive? and what is the difference in the two? not
a puter person but i'm really curious about this one.
sys. info.xp-home-256mg ddr-40 gig ultra dma hard drive. hope that's enough
info. i apologize for the length as well as the ignorance of this post but
please give me some info if you can.

 

[Kelly]

1. Check the BIOS boot menu.
2. White Space: http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_w.htm#wp

--

All the Best,
Kelly (MS-MVP)

Troubleshooting Windows XP
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com

Vote: Bo

 

[Guest]

the only thing that i can get to load is the setup page. no safe mode or
anything. can i check bios boot menu from setup page? why does bios detect
the 256mg/128kcache and not any drive?

 

[Malke]

the only thing that i can get to load is the setup page. no safe mode
or anything. can i check bios boot menu from setup page? why does bios
detect the 256mg/128kcache and not any drive?

When you first turn your computer on and you see "Press >some key< to
enter Setup", that is your motherboard's BIOS setup and has nothing to
do with the operating system. What Kelly was asking you was if the hard
drive was seen in the BIOS. The 256MB information the BIOS is seeing is
your memory, not any drives. One thing has nothing to do with the
other. Since the BIOS does not detect the drive, either the drive has
failed or the controller on the motherboard for the drive has failed.
This is a hardware issue and has nothing to do with the operating
system (Windows, which is software).

You can try these things, trying one at a time and testing to see if the
drive is detected in the BIOS after each change. Obviously, you will do
all work inside your computer with the computer turned off and
unplugged. I also am making the assumption that you did not make any
hardware changes (adding drives, moving things around and forgetting to
set jumpers correctly, not connecting things properly, etc.) and then
experience the problem.

1. Reseat the connectors on the ribbon cable going to the motherboard
and the drive.

2. Swap out the ribbon cable with a different, known-working one.

3. Try the drive on a different IDE (I assume you have IDE, but if SATA
this also applies) connector on the motherboard.

4. Try the drive in a different computer.

If the drive is not seen in Steps 1, 2 and 3 but is seen in a different
computer, you know your original computer's IDE motherboard connector
has failed. If the drive is not seen in a different computer, then you
know the hard drive has failed. Replace it.

Malke