I was out of town for a few days and when I returned and turned on my work computer all I got was a dark screen and the words "Operating System not Found" printed across the top. Any suggestions to what I could try to do to fix this or am I screwed? Don't get too in depth with computer lingo as I'm pretty much a dumb *** when it comes to computers.

 

Sounds to me like hard drive problems Bruker.

 

Make sure you don't have a floppy disk in the disk drive.

Then reboot.

 

When I was running windows 98se with the 10gb harddrive that came in this thing my computer would do that right before my hard drive took a dump. A new hard drive should take care of your problem and they are fairly cheap.

 

First check for a floppy disk in the drive (also make sure it's not trying to boot of a CD), if not.. then your hard drive might be having problems. Does the hard drive 'click' slowly when you turn the PC on? That's a good sign that it's dying or dead.

 

make sure there isnt a cd in the drive either.

 

Everyone has responded with some good suggestions.

I'm assuming that you're running Windows XP Home or Professional. I recently had what I thought was an issue with the hard drive on my desktop. The XP operating system would not come up after several reboots. I remembered that my kids were playing games on some website and that was the last time that my computer ran like it was supposed to. Well, long story short, you can try to get the operating system running by using a reboot CD or disk.

If you have a boot disk that can hopefully get your operating system going and you have Windows XP then you can try doing a 'System Restore' to a point when you know your computer was running fine and dandy. If you have XP, once you get the operating system up:

1. Click on 'Start'
2. Click on 'Help and Support'
3. In the 'Search' text box, type in 'System Restore wizard' and hit return
4. Click on the 'Restore my computer to an earlier time' radio button and click next.
5. Choose a date when you know your computer was running fine and dandy and click next.
6. Follow the rest of the instructions and let XP do its thing.

I'd try these steps before you start replacing the hard drive. I had a similar thing happen to me and found out that my hard drive wasn't the issue. Somehow it was software related and some changes were made internally. Probably due to when my kids were playing some games on a website. They don't play games on that website anymore.

Best bet is to use another computer and do some searches on 'Operating System Not Found'. You can read on some of the forums out there and you can also check the Microsoft website for your particular operating system. There should be some helpful advice that can be provided there, too, to help you resolve your issue.

Hope that helps.

 

floppy was the first thing that came to my mind as well

 

I have found that if there is a floppy disc in the drive that a message comes up saying that it's not a bootable disc in the drive or something to that effect.
I had a friends who's pc did the same thing and it turned out to be his hard drive...so that's why I suggested that.

 

What O/S and how old of a computer? It could be the hard drive, but there are other possibilities, so that info would be useful. Try going into the bios and see if your drive is being detected first. You'll usually get a prompt when you first power up to push a key, (usually DEL), to enter setup. There should be a screen showing what drives are installed. Make sure you see yours there. Most of the time though, that PARTICULAR message means it is finding the drive, but no boot sector on it. A lot of the evil viruses out there will wipe out your boot sector, so that's another possible explanation.

 

Can't you FDISK /MBR on that beast? Well if it's an older machine.

 

Wow... this just happened to me... I didn't have time to investigate, I unplugged my old drive, and plugged in a new one I prepared a few weeks earlier... This one is working and when I go to 'my computer' it shows the old drive is not formatted... try this before destroying your old drive. I plugged my old drive in as a slave drive...

I'm sure my old drive did take a dump... but I think I can start over, I have all my other disks....

mine actually read : Operating system failed to load