Vista-Operating System not found - the end?

Helen_J_3

Hello

I've turned computer on today to find the message on a blank screen saying 'operating system not found'

It's a HP Pavilion laptop purchased in 2008, never had a problem with it until now.

I can't imagine the hard disk is physically damaged because the laptop hasn't been moved/dropped or anything and was working fine yesterday?

Stupidly I only have important university work backed up, and now I'm scared if the hard drive has had it I'm going to lose all my music and pictures on the laptop? I have lots of music purchased from itunes on it too!

I don't mind paying out for a new hard drive, it's losing the data I'm worried about. Can anyone help?

closed

buy a usb hard disk caddy (£4) to get your data off, then reinstall windows from recovery partition, and buy a usb 2.5" 500GB disk (£40) and 50 dvd's (£10) to backup

CoolHotCold

Ok

HP's have a built in Diagnostics tool.
Turn on the system and press Esc and it should give you a option to do diagnostics, if not turn on and hit F10 (might be F2) to boot into ROM/BIOS and use the arrow keys to navigate to Hard Drive Diagnostics. If theres no fault with the HDD then its a software problem, try turning on the system and intimidate pressing F11 to boot into the HP recovery partition where you might be able to restore to a previous point in time using Windows System Restore (OR using HP Recovery Non-Destructive).

Helen_J_3

Thank you for the replies. I tried the Hard Drive Diagnostics thing before but it wouldn't run the diagnostics it just didn't respond! Anyway it's going to someone who knows more about them than I do so hopefully he can sort it!