Help with my friends laptop....missing OS?

[UDT89]

I have no idea what pron he downloaded but he totally f-ed his laptop. Of course being his friend that knows computers, he asks me. I take his lappy to my house and boot it. It says compaq when it starts, but then it gets to the black screen and says operating system not found.

So i take my win XP cd, nfr version, and boot it from that. It gets through everything, but when it asks where i want to install it it cant recognize his HD. Then i try to cancel the install, i get the blue error screen saying the computer will be restarted. It reboots and says the OS is not found.


Is his HD fried? I never seen a virus or whatever he downloaded do this before. Any ideas??

 

[Yomicron]

Does the BIOS see the hard drive? When you said that XP setup can't recognize his HD, does that mean it doesn't see it at all or that it is unable to use it?

 

[UDT89]

How can i check the bios? The computer wont boot that far for me to check them. I tried hitting every F-key to get the bios up but it wont happen.

When i say XP didnt recognize it, i mean like you know when you have to select where to install the OS, it says there are no mass storage devices found.


But the HD is there alright

Matt

 

[Yomicron]

Check out Compaq support page.

Its not uncommon for Compaq to require some obscure method to enter the BIOS.

You can also try removing the HD and reseating it.

 

[nanaki333]

did ya try running fdisk to see if that even picks up the drive? maybe somethin he downloaded made the partition go bye bye.

 

[KingofFah]

Operating System Not Found, had this problem before. You/he used the recovery disks, but he obviously has something different than the original (new HDD, etc). When this happened for a friend of mine that asked me to put in his new HDD, I ran recovery as he requested. I showed him it would not work, threw the recovery cd's in the trash and installed win 2k pro.

 

[UDT89]

still working at this.........recovery disks dont work, my win xp pro doesnt work, i still cant figure out how to get into the bios....what a mess

 

[UDT89]

got into bios......it was pointless. it didnt have anything to help me with the hard drive.


xp recognizes the HD, but cant "access" it when you have to select where to install it.

 

[OverVolt]

Send it back to compaq and let them deal with it. I used to have a compaq desktop long time ago and the BIOS was useless. I woudln't even call it a BIOS get into it by hitting F10 like as many times as u can. can u get to where the harddrive is located?? maybe compaq will only work with some bizzare OEM version of windows