Operating System Not Found

I have a compaq presario f700 series running vista home premium. Recently, my wife has been having problems where the screen gets a aqua tint or she gets a white screen with diagonal black lines. She has also been having problems with booting up. It would take rebooting it about 4-5 times in order to boot to where she could use the laptop. Per the HP website I updated the BIOS on the laptop to version F.08.

Here is the problem as of today. She can't boot up at all now. It pops up the "compaq" screen and gives the options to enter the bios utility. But other than that it says "err2err3." When I press enter it keeps that osd on the screen and says "operating system not found." I have change the boot order to boot skip the cdrom and boot from hard drive. I have also ran the check disk diagnostic test in the BIOS utility. Everything passed. I don't see anything about ide or sata in the bios screens. I even downloaded a recovery disk from neosmart and tried booting from the disk like they suggested. I always get that err2err3 message. Of course, my wife has photos she wants to keep on here. Any suggestions?

 

I have also checked to make sure the hard drive connections are good as well. Thanks.

 

A friend of mine happened to have the adapter you mentioned. When I hook it up to my other laptop, I can see it. But, it says I have to format it to use it. Looks like I might be screwed when it comes to getting my photos off the computer. Any other suggestions?

 

Boot to a live Linux CD - there are many flavors out there...if successful, you should be able to pull off your docs and pics via flash drive...