Operating system not found....and found again

[objectifmonde]

Hello,

I ve got this strange problem with my Advent Laptop running windows xp
sp2.

When I start it, "operating system not found "

Then I put the Recovery CD in and ive got the message. Recovery cannot
be continued, hard disk not found.

I switch off the computer and start again...same error....

I do this some times up to 10 times, and like by magic, the option"
press R for recovery appears.

The recovery options are there: i tried the 3 of them: system restore,
quick format, complete format.

But still have the same problem.

Now, I don t even bother to choose an option for the recovery.

I start my computer about 10 times until i have the option R Recovery,
and I quit to cancel the recovery, and the Windows XP start and let me
use my computer perfectly.

I can restart the computer from XP, and no problem.

Now if I switch off from XP, and try to switch one after a few
minutes... yet again, the same problem come back.

Sorry for the lenghty description, but I think necessary as I don t
find the same problem on any groups or website.

Thanks

J.

 

[Guest]

Hi J. Sounds alot like your hard drive is going bad or is dead already. The
messages "operating system not found" and "hard disk drive not found"
indicates this. A fast way to check, is to start the computer, enter the bios
at the beginning of the system start, and look for something simular to
system information. Look to see if it finds an active hard drive. If not,
your hard drive is most likely bad.

 

[Malke]

Hello,

I ve got this strange problem with my Advent Laptop running windows xp
sp2.

When I start it, "operating system not found "

Then I put the Recovery CD in and ive got the message. Recovery cannot
be continued, hard disk not found.

I switch off the computer and start again...same error....

I do this some times up to 10 times, and like by magic, the option"
press R for recovery appears.

The recovery options are there: i tried the 3 of them: system restore,
quick format, complete format.

But still have the same problem.

Now, I don t even bother to choose an option for the recovery.

I start my computer about 10 times until i have the option R Recovery,
and I quit to cancel the recovery, and the Windows XP start and let me
use my computer perfectly.

I can restart the computer from XP, and no problem.

Now if I switch off from XP, and try to switch one after a few
minutes... yet again, the same problem come back.

There is a hardware problem with your power supply and/or the
motherboard. Contact the laptop mftr.'s tech support for repair.

Malke

 

[Mike Fields]

Hello,

I ve got this strange problem with my Advent Laptop running windows xp
sp2.

When I start it, "operating system not found "

Then I put the Recovery CD in and ive got the message. Recovery cannot
be continued, hard disk not found.

I switch off the computer and start again...same error....

I do this some times up to 10 times, and like by magic, the option"
press R for recovery appears.

The recovery options are there: i tried the 3 of them: system restore,
quick format, complete format.

But still have the same problem.

Now, I don t even bother to choose an option for the recovery.

I start my computer about 10 times until i have the option R Recovery,
and I quit to cancel the recovery, and the Windows XP start and let me
use my computer perfectly.

I can restart the computer from XP, and no problem.

Now if I switch off from XP, and try to switch one after a few
minutes... yet again, the same problem come back.

Sorry for the lenghty description, but I think necessary as I don t
find the same problem on any groups or website.

Thanks

J.

It may be something else, but the times I have seen that sort
of thing involved the hard drive not spinning up (there used
to be a real problem with "stiction" where the drive would
fail to spin up.). See if you can feel the drive spin up when
you cycle the power - if it does not start, you get the "drive
not found" error, but when it does, then all is well and checkdisk
etc will not show any errors. Now would be a good time to
make sure you have an image of the drive also ;-)

mikey

 

[objectifmonde]

It may be something else, but the times I have seen that sort
of thing involved the hard drive not spinning up (there used
to be a real problem with "stiction" where the drive would
fail to spin up.). See if you can feel the drive spin up when
you cycle the power - if it does not start, you get the "drive
not found" error, but when it does, then all is well and checkdisk
etc will not show any errors. Now would be a good time to
make sure you have an image of the drive also ;-)

mikey

Thanks for your messages. It really seems to be what you just described
Mikey
What is an image of the drive ? I have this option in when the recovery
options start up.

Thanks

J.

 

[Mike Fields]

Thanks for your messages. It really seems to be what you just
described
Mikey
What is an image of the drive ? I have this option in when the
recovery
options start up.

Thanks

J.

An "image" of a drive can be made with a program like Ghost,
Acronis True Image (which I am not happy with but others are),
Terabyte Image for Dos or BING (a little geeky, but work well
and are small). They allow you to create a compressed"image"
of all the data on your drive (usually a partition) to somewhere
else (like another partition or another drive). Once you have
an image, you can do a restore to a new drive (or even the
existing partition if you get it trashed). It is a copy of ALL
data/files/etc on that partition. This is in contrast to normal
"backups" that people think of that is a backup of only selected
files or folders. File/folder type backups are usually smaller,
easier to recover single files from etc, while, if your disk
crashes, you can do a restore from a drive image onto a
new disk and be back up and running again with all of your
settings, tweaks etc. just as they were when you made the
image. There are many different "backup" strategies
and there is no single one that solves all of the issues. Do
a google search on backups or backup strategies and you
will get a better understanding of what is available. (there are
also ones like v-com's Autosave2 that sits in the background
and watches for files in the specified paths to change, making
a copy anytime it changes to somewhere else (and keeping
multiple versions). There is also a newsgroup called
alt.backup-software where a lot of this is discussed. The
big trick is to do SOMETHING to backup your important
data (and be able to recover when a drive goes somewhere
else ... )

mikey