Operating System Not Found?

[beverage]

OK, here's the deal, my friend just bought a new 60 gig hard drive, and CD-Burner, and an upgrade copy of XP Home to install in his dad's computer. The comp is a P III 950MHz or something along those lines, with 256 MB of RAM.

After trying to install stuff himself, he gives me a call and says he's having problems. So I head over, first things first fix a few wiring problems, then it's on to the install.

Boot from CD with the XP upgrade CD, it asks for an old windows cd to prove that a previous copy is owned, we put in his dad's old 98 CD, it reads it and lets us move on. I create a new partition on the drive and format it NTFS, and it copies the install files over to the HDD, then the "your computer will reboot in 15 seconds" screen comes up, and then it reboots.

So there it goes, rebooting, when bam, "Operating System Not Found" so what's keeping this from starting the GUI portion of the Windows XP install? Until that point, everything seems like it's going fine, but then out of nowhere it's as if we didn't just run through the initial portion of the install.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[MisterJackson]

You likely have the PC set to "Boot from CD" in the bios. Change it over to HDD as first boot device. If that doesn't work check your cables again.

Also see if the drive shows in the bios. If not, it could be a bad drive.

Also, make sure your HDD jumpers are correct.

 

[beverage]

boot order is floppy, CD, HDD, ... it comes up with the "press any key to boot from cd" so if you don't press, it goes on to HDD, that's when the message comes up, besides, if it was set to boot from cd it WOULD boot, as the windows XP CD is a bootable CD.

drive does show in bios

jumpers are correct.

i'm at a loss

 

[Nothinman]

Is the windows partition active? Windows setup is supposed to handle that, but maybe it didn't this time.

 

[tiap]

The first time you boot up with the new install cd is the only time it need be set to boot fron cd. On the subsequent installing operation reboots, it doesn't matter.
I usually let it setup in fat 32 for an upgrade and then goto ntfs when it working well.
If your friend didn't wipe out the original drive, put it back in as master and the new as master on the 2nd channel and use the software from the new hdrive (downloadable) to transfer the old os to the new hdrive. Then test the drive .Then try the xp os over the old os on the new drive.
Double check all the bios settings. Try with a 98 dos boot disk, and then xp cd.
Sometimes I've even had to put a pci vag card in to install and switch out later.

 

[beverage]

ok, we put in a 80 gig HDD I had, and we installed windows with zero problems, seems as if it's a problem with the 60 gig drive itself, but thanks for all the pointers guys.

 

[agnitrate]

Make sure it's set to the proper access mode (LBA vs CHS) and the BIOS is recognizing it properly.

-silver

 

[vo]

I was going to post but found this ...
I got the dreaded on my laptop "No Operating System found" ...
It was like once a week for a month then last week it is permanent.

Before I tried to use scandisk and fix any problem found but it still come back.
I think my drive is toasted but is there any hope ... laptop drive is $$$$

I tried to use the UBCD but it does not recognize my hard drive !!!

I ran XP SP2 ...

 

[vo]

Any ideas ?

 

[JulioX]

.

 

[Smilin]

That error is generated by the MBR boot code when it is unable to find a partition marked active in the partition table.

Either you are booting to the wrong hard disk (if you have more than one) or the disk you are booting to does not have a partiton marked active. You can correct this with either fdisk from a dos disk or diskpart from the recovery console.