- Sep 10, 2001
- 11,711
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My friend came over for help figuring out what's wrong with his PC.
It's a Dell XPS with Windows XP Pro SP3 on it.
He says he was working with Photoshop on a substantial sized file when suddenly the OS freezes. After failing to get the OS to respond he does a hard shut down and reboots. Immediately after BIOS posts the screen says Operating System Not Found.
I first tried bringing up a boot menu by pressing F8 but no matter what I try the menu never comes up, it always prints that message above immediately after BIOS posts - it happens so fast.
Next I put in the Windows XP CD and entered setup. I noticed there is no option for repairing an existing windows installation, it immediately shows a screen displaying 4 partitions on the drive. 1 partition is Dell's media direct thing, that's normal. But then it starts getting odd... There is one tiny unpartitioned space of like 49 bytes. I've seen this before especially over time I guess bad sectors of a hard drive as they are cleaned up are relegated to this unpartitioned space or something like that.
Then there is a partition delegated to a C drive but it's space is only 10% of the total disk space and a D drive with everything else. Now, I installed the OS on this guy's PC and I know for a fact we never set up more than one partition. I created the C drive and left the dell media direct thing but that's it. We never created a D drive.... But somehow there is one and it has close to 90% of the disk space!
Then on top of all that, the C drive and D drive have 100% of their space "free". It's as if they are completely empty.
What the heck could be going on here? I've never seen anything like this...
I suspect either a hrd drive malfunction perhaps something which screwed up all the master boot records and drive tables or perhaps some virus or worm had a lot of fun...
What do you think?
What do you recommend I do?
In the meantime I am going to DL KNOPPIX and see how Linux sees this disk drive. I could also pull it out and hook it into an external drive and see how my Windows XP desktop PC sees it.
It's a Dell XPS with Windows XP Pro SP3 on it.
He says he was working with Photoshop on a substantial sized file when suddenly the OS freezes. After failing to get the OS to respond he does a hard shut down and reboots. Immediately after BIOS posts the screen says Operating System Not Found.
I first tried bringing up a boot menu by pressing F8 but no matter what I try the menu never comes up, it always prints that message above immediately after BIOS posts - it happens so fast.
Next I put in the Windows XP CD and entered setup. I noticed there is no option for repairing an existing windows installation, it immediately shows a screen displaying 4 partitions on the drive. 1 partition is Dell's media direct thing, that's normal. But then it starts getting odd... There is one tiny unpartitioned space of like 49 bytes. I've seen this before especially over time I guess bad sectors of a hard drive as they are cleaned up are relegated to this unpartitioned space or something like that.
Then there is a partition delegated to a C drive but it's space is only 10% of the total disk space and a D drive with everything else. Now, I installed the OS on this guy's PC and I know for a fact we never set up more than one partition. I created the C drive and left the dell media direct thing but that's it. We never created a D drive.... But somehow there is one and it has close to 90% of the disk space!
Then on top of all that, the C drive and D drive have 100% of their space "free". It's as if they are completely empty.
What the heck could be going on here? I've never seen anything like this...
I suspect either a hrd drive malfunction perhaps something which screwed up all the master boot records and drive tables or perhaps some virus or worm had a lot of fun...
What do you think?
What do you recommend I do?
In the meantime I am going to DL KNOPPIX and see how Linux sees this disk drive. I could also pull it out and hook it into an external drive and see how my Windows XP desktop PC sees it.
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