Operating system not found

[arjun shrestha]

I have an emachines e528 and it says no operating system.

 

[DelJo63]

Likely the partition table has been corrupted :sigh:

 

[Tmagic650]

Or the boot drive has failed...

 

[Cobalt006]

Do you have a factory recover partition? Looks as though your OS crashed. Or as Jobeard has stated. Partition corrupt. Either way you are going to need to reinstall your OS. If this dose not work. Then It maybe a bad Hard drive.

 

[Tmagic650]

It's an eMachines so it is most likely a bad hard drive...

 

[DelJo63]

If the drive was bad, you would get a dialog at boot from the BIOS. No OS says clearly to me that the drive itself is ok but the MBR pointer to the partition is bad or the paritition itself is corrupt. IF you attempt to fix the partition with one of those tools, you may find everything is just fine. This might save whatever is precious on the HD, but if there's nothing of any import, ahh heck, just reformat and reinstall.

 

[Tmagic650]

"If the drive was bad, you would get a dialog at boot from the BIOS" Not necessarily. SMART queries could be turned off or "good" and the drive can still be bad

 

[DelJo63]

BIOS has been reporting l o n g before there was any such thing as S.M.A.R.T

Typically when BIOS fails to detect the HD, it goes for the CD or a Network boot.

 

[Tmagic650]

If the hard drive is the first device in the boot sequence. The bios will stop and report "no operating system found" and stay there. This lesser computer should be set as CD/DVD first though

 

[DelJo63]

Thank you - - you just confirmed my point that the HD is not bad at all, but there's a problem in the boot area.
To get NO OS,

1. the bios must recognize the HD
2. the MBR must exist and point into A partition
3. and that partition must be marked Active.

any failure of the above would cause BIOS to search the other possible devices for a bootable configuration