Here's a good one

yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
edited July 2004 in Hardware
My duron 1.3ghz computer worked yesterday early evening, maybe later, but forsure up to early evening. Today midday I go to move the mouse and get the monitor to pop on from standby, guess what, it doesn't come on, so I try and try and try, then hit the power button. When the computer restarts it says, "Operating System not found on any devices. Press any key to continue." I can't get passed this, checked the cheezy compaq bios and made sure the hard drive booted first since I know sometimes it can act up if the floppy/cd are before the hard drive. It wasn't first so I thought I fixed it, but of course it didn't work. So... after just reformatting and installing stuff for literally days all day long I have to start from scratch, unless any of you very wise Icronaughts or visitors now how to fix this. Does anyone?

As always, running Windows XP.

My next step is to crack open the case, which proves very irritating and hurts my fingers since I kicked the case on a compaq rage (which believe it or not actually fixed the problem it seemed). I'll basically be checking the connections, one hard drive, one cable, not many odds for me to find something wrong.

The mystery is it did this all on its own, no signs of trouble at all, computer was in 100% working order with as far as I know 0% spyware, adware, viruses, trojans, etc.

Comments

  • verselloversello New
    edited July 2004
    Is this machine overclocked by any chance?
  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited July 2004
    Nope, it's impossible with Compaq, but what's new?
  • HalOfBorgHalOfBorg West Virginia
    edited July 2004
    Sounds rather like the HD curled up and died. Try replacing the cable, reset the plugs of course, try a different IDE/Serial plug.

    Does the BIOS identify the HD? Can you read anything on it from a boot floppy? (not that it will see a NTFS partition)
  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited July 2004
    it does recognize it in the bios, but sometimes when the computer is started it says what it says when if finds new hardware, it shows disk one as 116,XXX MB, disk 3 and 4 as cd drives, so maybe the hard drive is bad then? Wow, 2 seagate drives bad in the same week maybe. I havn't tried another cable yet, doing that now...
  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited July 2004
    cable did it, but chk dsk is really working here, the first time I have seen it actually work, first it deleted an entire screen full of corrupt files, then did some correcting on something else, paused for a minute, and now is recovering Orphaned files which is doing about 10 per second and has been going on about 3 minutes now.

    Seems alright, whooo, that got me to build some compaq rage up again.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited July 2004
    a bad ide cable could easily be the cause of lots of bad sectors - keep in mind that sometimes chkdsk wont fix them. so after the chkdsk /R finishes, do a regular chkdsk again and see how many kb it finds in bad sectors. if its not 0, you may want to reformat
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