No OS

R

Ray

I have a Compaq laptop running WindowMe that boots to no operating system
found. When I use boot floppy it finally initializes after 5 minutes or so.
It will not see the HD with the exception of one time I was able to check
the directories in C:. Will not boot from a cd with xp on it either. Seems
like the symptoms keep changing. The first problem was Drive I/O error or
something similar. Then it went to the No OS error message. The bios on
this doesn't give much info. Just allows you to change boot sequence and
times. Just before it goes to setup bios I do see boot screen with hd and
cd and such. Shows hd as Toshiba drive 0. Any ideas? thanks, Ray
 
D

Dave C.

Ray said:
I have a Compaq laptop running WindowMe that boots to no operating system
found. When I use boot floppy it finally initializes after 5 minutes or so.
It will not see the HD with the exception of one time I was able to check
the directories in C:. Will not boot from a cd with xp on it either. Seems
like the symptoms keep changing. The first problem was Drive I/O error or
something similar. Then it went to the No OS error message. The bios on
this doesn't give much info. Just allows you to change boot sequence and
times. Just before it goes to setup bios I do see boot screen with hd and
cd and such. Shows hd as Toshiba drive 0. Any ideas? thanks, Ray

If it was a desktop, I'd say this sounds suspiciously like a dead CMOS
battery. You might want to pull out the manual for your notebook to see if
the CMOS is protected by a battery. If so, replace it. IF not . . .

Then you either have a hard drive controller failure, a hard drive failure,
or simply a corrupted disk. My best guess would be hard drive failure. IF
you can get it to boot to floppy, have you tried fdisk? If fdisk sees a
disk (you don't have to delete any partitions, just see if fdisk FINDS a
disk by having it display partition information), then you might try a
re-install of Windows ME.

I think you're probably going to find (eventually) that your hard drive is
toast, though. -Dave
 
D

David Maynard

Ray said:
I have a Compaq laptop running WindowMe that boots to no operating system
found. When I use boot floppy it finally initializes after 5 minutes or so.
It will not see the HD with the exception of one time I was able to check
the directories in C:. Will not boot from a cd with xp on it either. Seems
like the symptoms keep changing. The first problem was Drive I/O error or
something similar. Then it went to the No OS error message. The bios on
this doesn't give much info. Just allows you to change boot sequence and
times. Just before it goes to setup bios I do see boot screen with hd and
cd and such. Shows hd as Toshiba drive 0. Any ideas? thanks, Ray

Sounds like a bad hard drive, as the 'first' error indicated. In
particular, I'd say it's having a problem spinning up and initializing the
heads. So it has no OS to boot and the spin up problem causes the system to
hang when trying to boot the floppy, waiting for the hard drive, and is
probably why it appears to not boot from CD... either waits, or times out,
on the hard drive.
 
R

Ray

Thanks for the advice. Sometimes it sees the hd and sometimes not. Have
tried putting floppy first in boot order and it takes about 5 minutes or
more to run startup disk. Then it will not see the hd to fdisk or scandisk.
Or it will see it and hang when I do try to do it. Seems like the longer it
is on and trying to diagnose the worse it gets. Seems like if it were just
a bad hd it would still bring up the floppy ok if it was first in the boot
order. Any ideas? Bad mobo or cpu? thanks, Ray
 
D

Dave C.

Ray said:
Thanks for the advice. Sometimes it sees the hd and sometimes not. Have
tried putting floppy first in boot order and it takes about 5 minutes or
more to run startup disk. Then it will not see the hd to fdisk or scandisk.
Or it will see it and hang when I do try to do it. Seems like the longer it
is on and trying to diagnose the worse it gets. Seems like if it were just
a bad hd it would still bring up the floppy ok if it was first in the boot
order. Any ideas? Bad mobo or cpu? thanks, Ray

Well with that extra information, I'd say bad power supply or bad hard
drive, with bad hard drive as most likely suspect. -Dave
 

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