Operating system not found.. Help!

charlishae

Hi,

Well it looks like my laptops died on me, it's been playing up for a few weeks but today when you switch it on it wont get past the blue start up screen. Eventually it comes up with a black screen saying operating system not found.

Can anyone help?!
Thanks

scheming_gypsy

can you hear your hard drive spinning up?
you don't by any chance have a floppy drive in the laptop with a disk in it?

charlishae

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

can you hear your hard drive spinning up?
you don't by any chance have a floppy drive in the laptop with a disk in it?

Hi, yes I forgot to mention it is making a funny noise! No my laptop does not have a floppy drive. I'm not even sure if I have the recovery disk for it.

charlishae

Well I'm in the bios but not actually sure I'm looking at! In the boot priority order it says 1. ACHI CD P1-tsstcorp... And 2. Is ACHI Hdd is that what it should be? I'm sure it was different before

charlishae

Thanks for replying. I tried changing the order and choosing the default settings in bios but no joy. Think I'm going to have to find someone to repair it.

Hammyman

charlishae wrote: »

Hi, yes I forgot to mention it is making a funny noise!

Probably a dead hard drive then. A hard drive is something you can change yourself with nothing more than a philips screwdriver. A new hard drive should set you back around £35 delivered for a 320GB one and it takes 5 minutes to swap over. You'll need recovery discs or Windows installation discs to put the operating system back on.

davetrousers

Download Ubuntu (using a different computer) put that on a USB memory stick, then enter BIOS and boot from USB. This will give you a perfectly usable operating system that you can use for your normal tasks, and you can then try to retrieve your MP3s, photos etc.