it reads "cannot find operating system"
should i throw it away or is there slim chance that it can be revived?

5/24/2007 11:57:01 AM

hdd failure

5/24/2007 11:58:17 AM

theres a good chance that everything but the hard drive are fine so you dont want to throw it away

but if you try booting it up like 10-20 times and always get that "No Operating System / System Disk" error or whatever, its gonna be tricky to recover teh data

I would try pluggnig that hard drive as a slave drive in another computer and see if you can get it to recognize any of the files...if you can even get it up for a little while you might be able to copy some of the data to an external drive...dont be too optimistic about your chances though

5/24/2007 12:09:12 PM

Quote :

"if you can even get it up for a little while"

5/24/2007 12:22:16 PM

THATS WHAT SHE SAID

5/24/2007 12:29:46 PM

how much would a new hard drive cost? If i put a new one in would i have a working pc?

5/24/2007 4:29:10 PM

new drives are dirt cheap. 120GB for <$50 or 200GB for $60-70
If you put a new drive in, you'll have to completely reinstall Windows and all your programs, and transfer any data you salvaged from the old drive.

5/24/2007 5:41:03 PM

at what point does it say cannot find operating system. Is it right at the beginning or a little bit after? Because sometimes if your keyboard is not plugged in, right at the beginning it will say keyboard error but if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it. Then it'll continue on but go to a black screen that says "cannot find operating system." If you check to make sure all your connections are correct and you still have this error, you probably have to reinstall your operating system. Go to the BIOS set up by press DEL during boot up and go to boot devices and make CD/DVD for 1st boot up device. Then you will have you reinstall your OS with a CD.

5/26/2007 9:59:15 PM

You could always try a live-distro cd. Thinx like Knoppix and Puppy-Linux boot an operating system straight from the cd, "bypassing" the default OS. This is a good way to figure out if the problem lies in the hardware or the software. It also allows you to save any information from your HDD (if you can access it).

5/27/2007 6:28:47 PM