Operating system not found: Help

[lsamorph2]

I have a Presario 1692 laptop. At boot up it's telling operating system not found. Someone told me it could be the cmos battery. I already replace it but is still give me the same message. I even changed the hard drive but no luck. Any ideas what it could be? All help will be greatly appriciated.

 

[Zelmo3]

Weird thing happened to me last week. After running WinXP successfully from a RAID setup on a PCI card for a few weeks, it suddenly started having problems with other hard drives, and then wouldn't boot XP any more. I noticed one day as the computer sat telling me that it wouldn't boot that the list of IRQs set by the BIOS included three devices using IRQ11, including my RAID card. I pulled the card out and booted from an IDE drive, and everything worked again. Well, everything that was still connected (sniff, no more RAID).
Check your BIOS for shared IRQs; you may have to set some manually.

 

[blizz]

Dumb question, I know, but its happened to me...is there a floppy disk in the disk drive?

Good luck.

 

[lsamorph2]

Nothing is in the floppy drive at all.

 

[newbiepcuser]

You stated you changed the hard drive and you installed the new OS on this? I do remember that Compaq somtimes places the BIOS on the hard drive itself. Does the BIOS even recognize the new drive.

2nd option.
Place a bootable floppy with FDISK in it. Run FDISK. See if your partitions are still there and good. Is there a partition that is active.


There is also a chance it could be virus. So you might want to see if you can use bootable antivirus program on CD-rom or floppy disk to scan the system.

 

[lsamorph2]

When I swap the hard drive the BIOS did recognize the new drive. But now it does not detect it at all. I will try the other two suggestions. Thanks for the help guys. I will keep updating.

 

[Erasmus-X]

It sounds like you definitely have a hard disk issue. Try reseating it, if it is easily removable. I've seen several cases where the contacts between the drive and the computer become loose, causing the drive to physically disconnect.

Also check if there's a lock switch on the hard disk door. Some laptops have this and if it's set to unlock, the drive will not be physically connected to the computer.