No operating system found??!!

[ncyim]

Please help! My laptop started clicking like a time bomb and would not respond to any request. Had to hard boot - now it comes up Operating System not found - Oh No!! What can I do to get my data?? Is this machine junk?

Nancy

[Murf]

Hi Welcome to CTH

Clicking not good I'm afraid.

Does it have a floppy? If you do not have a floppy bootdisk go HERE

Download the file Windows 98 Custom, No Ramdrive

Once it is downloaded (do not download to a floppy), double click on the file and follow the menu (have a clean floppy in the floppy drive), it will extract the bootfiles to the floppy.

Now boot the laptop with this bootdisk, and hopefully you will end up at the A:/> prompt.

At the A:/> prompt type the following:

c: (hit<enter>)
dir (hit<enter>)

does it see the files on your hard drive c:?

If you get an error, then take the floppy out reboot and when the first screen comes up start hitting the DELETE key, or whatever key the screen tells you to use to get into SETUP.

Once in there look around the various menu items, each computer is different, and find an item that says something like AUTO DETECT and see if it finds the hard drive. If it does then hit ESCAPE and find the item that says SAVE AND EXIT, it should then boot up. If it does, you better start backing things up.

Let us know.

[degsy]

Note, if your drive is NTFS then using a Win98 Startup disk will not detect the drive.