Ancient laptop "no operating system found" problem

[Darren192]

I have an aged P200 (I think) laptop (Gateway 2000) which I kept for my children to play a Win 98 game which won't play on anything newer - Babyz, if you're interested.

The battery is flat and I only play when connected to the mains. However, on the latest turn on I get the message "No operating system found". Anything I can do about this? The laptop has a floppy drive and cd drive.

 

[mailpup]

It sounds like the hard drive has failed. If you have the Windows 98 and driver installation disks that may have come with the laptop way back when, you could buy a replacement hard drive and reinstall everything and be good to go.

 

[Darren192]

I fiddled around with the laptop earlier, for no apparent reason Windows came in and its as good as gold. Odd but welcome.

 

[GeekieNick101]

That is pretty odd, maybe the hard drive is on it's last leg and will permanently fail soon?

 

[Tedster]

run chkdsk or a good registry repair program. CCleaner and glarysoft are free. try 'em.

 

[Spyder_1386]

You might wanna start backing up anything you'd like to keep from that HD.

Spyder_1386

 

[gguerra]

Your backup battery could be going as well which would affect BIOS settings and therefore the ability to boot. The BIOS tells the system from which drive to boot from (i.e. Hard Drive 0)

 

[Darren192]

I think my best bet is to move it on, I only kept it tp play Babyz, a win 98 game my children love. I took the opportunity to delete all my old personal files.