Operating System not found - MBA and PXE

[Pete M]

Hi All

Please help! Seemingly randomly my Dell Notebook started having
difficulty booting up. (I've had no problems for 18 months prior to
this).

It goes to the system screen (Dell logo) and then instead of the XP
Pro boot screen it says:

Initializing Managed Boot Agent (MBA) Press CTRL SHIFT A to configure
- or something like that!

Then it goes into something called a Pre-Boot Execution Environment
(PXE) and eventually gives the message Operating System not found. It
may do this for four or five boot-up attempts but eventually it will
'catch' the OS and boot up fine. It's this random nature of the
problem which is most confusing.

Any ideas why it would do this?

My system is as follows:

Pentium 4M 1.8Ghz
512Mb RAM
XP Pro - bang up to date
NVIDIA GeForce 2 Go 32Mb
MS Office Standard
Various other bits of software but nothing wacky.

I can't pin down a time or reason why it started doing this - very
frustrating. I'd really appreciate some kind expert's help as Dell
have not been that helpful so far.

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

You may find some here:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q="Managed+Boot+Agent"&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=G&scoring=d

 

[Steve Marfisi]

Go into the BIOS setup, and modify the boot order - place your HD
first in the boot order, ahead of the MBA boot ROM.

Steve Marfisi
www.emboot.com

 

[Pete M]

Thanks Steve but I have no such entry for MBA boot ROM in my BIOS Boot
List, just floppy, Hard Drive, CD Rom, Internal Ethernet Card and
CardBus Ethernet.
I've tried disabling the latter two, but to no effect.

Dell assure me that my HDD is dying and have just stung me £300 for a
new one - good job the company is paying!

Thanks to those who have helped with this!

Pete M