no o/s found

I have an old tower that has Win Me ( bill gates joke on the world). It started freezing up ALL the time. So I installed XP upgrade. It worked fine for a long time, until one day it said "No O/S Found".There was no recovery disk with either the Me or XP programs. There are some important files that I need to retrieve. Can anyone give me an ideea how to either fix the O/S error or atleast a way to retrieve the info.
Also is it possibleto use the harddrive from that tower to be a slave HD. Thanks.

 

If you have the disk that you upgraded to XP from, you might try a repair install.

 

This kind of stuff is my niche.
Yes, you can use it as a slave. Or, you can use the recovery console.
Boot into the install CD and then when you get to the blue screen with all the info on it, press R. The screen will then do something then turn black. From here
Select your install.
Type in Administrator
Press Enter.
Then type fixboot and press enter
after that is done,
Then type fixmbr and press enter
Then you can type exit and power down.
This should have fixed it. If not, please post again.

 

Last system I bought with that error had a bad master HDD, swapped it for the slave and reinstalled the OS, Windows 98.

 

*** Hi bud I hope your Jesus day was blessed. Here is what i have. I turn on the computer and see the hp screen ( i can get to the bios from here) anfter a minute it go sraight to a black screen with " no operating system found". Do you know of anything I can do. Also if i use a 2000 full install disk with the product key, can i install it and it will start loading. And after i do that and fix the errors in reg and clean it up , will i be able to upgrade 2000 to xp. Thanks again

 

Well, when I had that 'no OS found' problem it turned out to be a bad ribbon cable, rare but it happens, luckily I had a spare one. Does the BIOS see the drive in the first place, you should at least be able to get in there?

BTW, erm, I don't believe zDawg32 posts here anymore. Maybe just slave the drive to get what you need in another system if you can do that. I see that you're not in any hurry.

 

It shows the start up order from bios. I set it up to boot from the cd first and used a boot disk. Put the boot disk in and shut it off and started it up. It did the same thing, the bluehp intro screen and went to the black screen and said "no operating system found". I appreciate your time very much, is there any other suggestions.

 

Can someone tell me how to use this hardrive as a slave so that I can get at the info that is on it.

 

Go to the HD manufacturers website and get the jumper setting unique to your HD for slave. Set the jumpers accordingly.
This will only work if you already have another hard drive in your computer up and running as a master drive with it's own op system. Additionally you may have to swap the position of the hard drives on the ribbon.

 

I was going to buy a new harddrive and make it the master. The harddrive that is down was loaded originally with ME and upgraded to XP. I do not have the ME disk. I do have the install for a WIN 2000 with the reg code. Can I use that o/s on the new harddrive and then can i upgrade it to the XP upgrade disk.

 

The short answer is yes, but (there is always a but) if you have registered the upgrade disk already on the other HD you will have to call MS and get a registration code over the phone because that copy of windows upgrade has already been activated. Depending on who answers the phone this may be an easy task or they may denie you based on that copy already being registered. I've been successful on 1 occassion and unsuccessful on 2 others. Give it a shot.

 

This is a long post, I hope some of the information helps or points the poster in the right direction.

Check the BIOS:
Have you entered the BIOS, press F1, F2 or F9 or F10.. etc it'll say something like "Press ____ to enter system setup" press it, press it a few times, restart and keep pressing it till you get in there. Once in there depending on the type of BIOS you should look for either two horizontal columns of text navigate to "Standard CMOS/Setup Features" or the menu is vertical look for "Main" press enter. Look for Primary Master and Primary Slave.. beside I'd image Primary Master it should list your hard disk. If it lists none navigate down there and press enter or the command listed on screen to auto detect the hard disk. If no hard disk is found then that might well be your problem with the machine.

If a hard disk is found then it's just a matter as the other poster suggested of getting an XP disk and either having it fix the boot sector or use it to fix the installation. There is always the possibility that the disk is bad and still being detected in the BIOS. Does the disk click or grind at all or has it in the past?


Boot from CD:
If you want to boot from a CDROM e.g. to install Windows XP or Windows 2000 you might need to make a DOS boot disk with a CD driver added if your BIOS does not support booting from CDROM. You'd set the computer to boot from removable A: then insert the floppy, restart and once you've booted to DOS you should be looking at the A: prompt: Without the quotes at the A: prompt type the following:

"D:" (D: being your CD drive letter)
"CD\I386"
"winnt"

Windows will now start the install from within DOS and should move to the various setup stages and will in time bring the GUI online so you'll have mouse support again.

If you get a failure during setup make a note of when the failure happened, before coping files, after, detecting hardware... if an error code is presented make a note also and post it here or google it.

Old Hardware & New Hardware:
Another thing to keep in mind is.. if you're running a machine that's at least close to 10 years old you may have issues with new IDE hard drives. The older BIOS may only be able to see a certain amount of the space available. You might want to check this and possibly get an updated BIOS if needed. Also if your running FAT32 which I suspect with an upgrade from a 9x to XP the default file system presented should be FAT32. FAT32 can only access the first 32GB of a hard disk. You'd have to partition the disk or to get all the space that is if it can be seen by the BIOS. If your doing a reinstall format (format will destroy all data on the disk) with NTFS.


Getting the Information Out:
Before connecting that drive to another computer make sure the virus scan is up to date, once connected scan the drive before you touch any files! Better safe than sorry!

If you really badly just need the information off the drive you can set the jumpers on it to Slave and install it in another machine on the secondary position on the IDE cable. An easier route if this is a temporary setup is don't touch the jumpers and connect it to the IDE that the CD/DVD is on. That is assuming the CD/DVD is connected via it's own IDE cable. Copy the files, shut down pull the old drive and reconnect the CD/DVD drive. Another option is to set the drive as "CS" or cable select, this way the BIOS will get to make up it's mind if the device will be "Master" or "Slave".

Hard Disk Jumpers
The jumpers on an IDE drive is normally located at the rear you should see something similar to two sets of empty pins (4 pins) and two covered by a small plastic clip ::: On the top or on the drive it should have a small diagram of which pins are what. Normally they are marked MA = Master SL = Slave and CS = Cable Select move the pin to the desired location in order to set it.

Another Way to Skin this Cat:
Buy a IDE - USB drive enclosure/kit and just pull the drive, connect it to the IDE cable and plug the USB cable into a working computer.. Instant HDD, no opening your other computer, no messing with anything and no jumpers! Just scan that drive or virus' and you should be ok!

XP Activation:
Reactivation is very easy, worst thing happens is you'll call Microsoft and they will talk you through the process. Very quick, easy and painless. I just reused an old license I had and had it running in a new machine after 5 minutes activation. Microsoft will allow you 30 days to activate Windows XP.

Sorry for the long post, I hope this helps!

 

You can upgrade from 98, ME, NT, 2000 to XP Home or Professional. You can also upgrade from 95, 98, ME, NT to 2000. You won't have to activate 2000 like you did XP but you will still have to active XP again once it's up and running. If you're doing a clean install of 2000 you should select the NTFS file system instead of FAT32 unless you dual boot with another OS that needs FAT or FAT32. You may also want to make sure the BIOS on that machine can recognize all the space available on current hard disks.

 

I appreciate your reply. I can get into the BIOS and I am going to go through your instructions. I did want to let you know that there is a clicking noise when it is trying to boot. I will reply to you after I go through your to do list. And your text is perfect especially for a novice like me. Thanks alot.

 

I’m glad I could help. If the drive shows up in the BIOS and you have a clicking sound, it’ll be fairly loud click, click, click sound your actuator heads/motor might have gone bad in which case you’d need to replace the drive. The machine might also pause for a few seconds while it clicks during POST when the manufacturer logo appears or while trying to load the OS then stopping or slowing after the No OS error is displayed. I hope that’s not the case! Do keep in mind if the drive does show up in the BIOS and you have the click sound while it tries to load the OS which gives you the no OS found error message that could also be the same problem.

This is just one possible cause, there could be many! Move through the list, post more questions and any more information you have.

Good luck!

 

Christ, did you try booting from a CD already, and if so, result? If you don't have a bootable CD, do you have access to a working system where you could burn one?

I agree that it sounds as if the head is unable to engage. There is a small chance that this could be from damage to the boot sector. Most of the major drive manufacturers have diagnostic/repair Utilities on their websites and some of these do a surprisingly good job. You would need to ensure that your CD or DVD drive is functioning ok to have a chance - or on a system that old perhaps there is a 3.5 floppy accessible?

 

While doing a cold boot, I press the delete key and it started running. I ran emco malware, 1 click reg and 1 click disk and spyware blaster and smart defrag. I also am removing a bunch of junk. And it passed the big test, shut down and boot up.
There are some stuff on add/remove program that says they are missing the uninstall. Thanks for all your help!!!

 

Great I'm glad it's working again. My advice is backup all your important files after you are sure all the scumware is gone. You might want to check out http://housecall.trendmicro.com and run a free scan. Very handy in those cases where scumware has disabled or compromised your antivirus. Best to run it in Safe Mode with Networking under XP.