Operating system not found

[nancyann]

Hello,
I have got a problem with my computer..... it is telling me no operating system found when i first turn on my pc. I am running windows 98se or was running win 98se. i can get as far as...... to change system settings press the f1 key or to display messages press the tab key..... f1 brings up the bios and the tab key just shows key board detected mouse detected then says press f1 to stup or esc..... esc goes back to no OS found. I need to get all or atleast some of my stuff back on my hard drive. Any help would be greatly apperciated. Thanks! Nancyann

 

[wlknaack]

You could have some damage or corruption in the boot sector of the HDD. You need to boot to a Win98 Boot Disk and if you don't have one, go to bootdisk.com and download and create the boot floppy. When you boot to the floppy, run the chkdsk commands (like chkdsk /r, chkdsk /f) and fdisk commands (like fdisk /mbr). Then remove the floppy and reboot.

Information concerning the above commands can be found at the following link:

http://www.computerhope.com/msdos.htm#02

 

[Vigilante]

I second the notion. Either boot sector problems, or your drive died in some way. A more remote possability is some kind of malware wacked some system files.

Hopefully the drive isn't dead completely though. Crossing my fingers.
If you don't feel like trying to boot this one, you can take the hard drive out and put it as a SLAVE on another PC, do NOT let it try to boot on another PC, but connect it as a secondary slave. This way you can troubleshoot the drive from a working OS. And/or copy data back or attempt data recovery.

Good luck!

 

[nancyann]

Sorry for the delay....
I made a bootdisk from the boot disk .com site ran it and it checked out good when i ran it, i done the chk/dsk commands it will not let me do the fdisk /mbr it tells me no fixed disk present. Also I can get to the boot with the 6 choice menus 1. Normal 2. logged (\BOOTLOG.TXT) 3. safe mode 4. step by step confirmation 5. command prompt only 6 safe mode command prompt only. All of which gives me the A:\ Tell me more about Passing as a slave on another computer. Since I have the system apart i will go ahead and try this one, I have nothing to loose, everything on my harddrive is more than likely gone that i wanted to get back. So go ahead and telll me how this can be done. Any help will be great and to wlknaack (what a great and useful site) Thanks!