Operating system not found

[skiddieleet]

At school I have seen this message on three different computers. They all run win 95. One time I watched someone fix it except what he did was just copy the hard drive from the computer next to the broken one. Is there any other way to fix this? And how does this happen? Thanks.

[phishphreek]

Normally this happens when your MBR (master boot record) is not found.

Boot with a boot floppy and at the command prompt... type

fdisk /mbr

In a worse case scenario, the hard drive is bad. Get a new one.

[MrLinus]

The other thing to watch for is the boot sequence. If it's looking for an OS in floppy or CDrom, it may miss the hard drive all together. Alternatively, check for a floppy in the A: (I've had that happen to a few students).

[bballad]

This is usually due to a floppy in the A drive...the next most common cause would be the hard drive removed from the boot sequence/HD not setup as master fallowed by messed up MBR. My guess is that your school has reoccurring issues with students whipping the HD, which is why they just copy the system over from somewhere else.

[gore]

also if you just cant leave **** alone like i seem to do sometimes, iv seen this message on MY computer before, lol had to redo the hole thing MBR up to partition table, not fun but learning experiance.

[skiddieleet]

Thank you all very much.

[Wazz]

You can also boot with a boot floppy and at the A: prompt type "sys c:\", this will transfer the system files and overwrite any corrupt ones. This has been known to save my @$$. Happy Hunting....

[er0k]

heh also make sure the jumpers arent all fux0red up. check cabling on the hdd's etc before getting new hdd's, could just be bad p-cable.

[amazingzarkon]

Originally posted here by Wazz
You can also boot with a boot floppy and at the A: prompt type "sys c:\", this will transfer the system files and overwrite any corrupt ones. This has been known to save my @$$. Happy Hunting....

I need to second that sys c:\ information. It's right on the money. If this is a recurring problem, you might want to make that the virus protection is installed and functional. I seem to recall a lot of old time viruses targeting the MBR and blowing it all to hell - leaving you with that "OS not found" message.

Good Luck!

[spyrul]

Originally posted here by MsMittens
Alternatively, check for a floppy in the A:

yeah, but that would return "boot disk failure" or whatever, not "operating system not found".