Renfield-64 Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 Hi One of the PCs on our network has the following error when I switched it on this morning: "An operating system wasn't found. try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." The boot order is: CD/RW drive HDD The BIOS is seeing the HDD. It doesn't matter if I change the HDD to be first it still happens. I'ts not the SATA cable as I have tried changing that. Any other ideas folks?
sted Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 if the bios cant see the hdd odds on the hdd has died
detjo Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 ... assuming there is nothing plugged into a USB port ?
woolmer Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 as detjo says, someone hasnt left a memory stick plugged in have they?
Renfield-64 Posted October 7, 2013 Author Posted October 7, 2013 if the bios cant see the hdd odds on the hdd has died Yes but as I said, the BIOS is seeing the HDD.
gmonks Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 Yes but as I said, the BIOS is seeing the HDD. But is there a memory stick plugged in?
tmcd35 Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 Given the boot order it's unlikely to be anything plugged into the USB. How old is the machine, does sound like a hard drive on it's way out. Have you tried booting from CD into a WinPE build or Linux desktop? From there you can take a look at the drive, see what's on it. Or add the drive as a slave in another machine. Wouldn't surprise me, if you made it a slave, if windows wanted to reformat the drive... Time to buy a new drive and rebuild.
sted Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 if you boot off a windows/linux cd can it see any partitions/data
Renfield-64 Posted October 7, 2013 Author Posted October 7, 2013 I tried another HDD and it worked ok so it does point to the HDD. I put the HDD into a reader and its empty! It shows 99Mb used but there are no files on it. How does a disk completely erase itself?
Marci Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 By someone booting from a removeable disc and formatting it.
tmcd35 Posted October 7, 2013 Posted October 7, 2013 I tried another HDD and it worked ok so it does point to the HDD. I put the HDD into a reader and its empty! It shows 99Mb used but there are no files on it. How does a disk completely erase itself? Faulty controller. Corrupt FAT table. Had it happen to a 2Tb USB ext drive before last Christmas - with all my backups on, not impressed! Like I said above, time to buy a new drive.
Renfield-64 Posted October 7, 2013 Author Posted October 7, 2013 Yes but there is no one smart enough in the school to do this.
Renfield-64 Posted October 7, 2013 Author Posted October 7, 2013 Faulty controller. Corrupt FAT table. Had it happen to a 2Tb USB ext drive before last Christmas - with all my backups on, not impressed! Like I said above, time to buy a new drive. Ok, I have a spare one from a PC with a motherboard fault, I'll try that.
Garacesh Posted October 8, 2013 Posted October 8, 2013 Yes but there is no one smart enough in the school to do this. Accidental PXE boot gone wrong?
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