Need help please!! "operating system not found"

[tboo]

I sold a laptop to my boss. His daughter uses it a lot and is notorious for FUBARing the thing with spyware..etc from surfing & downloading mp3s..etc from shady sites. today he gets the "operating system not found" message. I take the laptop home & ran some diagnostics-BIOS detects the hard drive, - if i try to install xp, it will detect the drive & format it + copy the files for installation, but after it reboots the 1st time during install(right after formatting) it will say "operating system not found". the hd is a fujitsu so I got their drive cheking utility & ran comprehensive tests-drive is OK. I am now erasing the drive with another fujitsu utility thats supposed to erase everything(mbr...etc)-this is a long process & will take several hours.

Anybody have any ideas what is going on or how I can remedy this?

 

[Justin216]

Put in the XP disk and boot up. Go into the recovery console (R on the 1st menu?) and when you finally get to a command prompt, type fixmbr...that might fix it....

 

[dannybek]

The mal ware is notorious. They can get into the deepest part of the system. One person I knew had his computer with malware. They would always shutdown the computer if one was trying to install adaware or the like. Persistance and determination is key to beating this. Best of luck.

 

[tboo]

Originally posted by: Justin216
Put in the XP disk and boot up. Go into the recovery console (R on the 1st menu?) and when you finally get to a command prompt, type fixmbr...that might fix it....

Tried that-no dice.


From what I understand I need to completely wipe the mbr-I hope the erase program from fujitsu does the trick-i assume that is the problem(some sort of boot sector virus)-the hd, physically, checks out fine

 

[tboo]

Right now im erasing the hard drive with fjerase that I got from fujitsu-this takes a long time(about 10% per hour). I tried it last night, but it froze at 45% so im going to try it again today while im at work. Im doing this in hoping that it will eradicate any boot sector viruses-if there are any. I tried fdisk/mbr with a boot disk, but it says no fixed disks are found

 

[ActuaryTm]

Unfortunately, the message you are receiving is also common to drives that are beginning to fail, or where complete failure is eminent.

 

[tboo]

Solved it! I did a hd erase with the fujitsu drive erase program-it took a long time, but now the hard drive is back to normal. Must have been a boot sector virus

 

[imported_buggs]

It sounds possibly like the same thing I run into when installing luinux on the hard drive. the thing is to fdisk kind of thing, like you did and got it to work. you need to completely delete all partitions etc and then create new ones, or like yer app did, it needs to be fully erased real good like a new partition from fdisk kind of thing.

for some reason for linux, when i install linux, then use windows to reinstall, it will install but no boot. so i need to fdisk it by delete partition, create new partition then finally it works.