Operation system not found

[john56]

i have a sony vaio laptop
i have windows xp
when i turn on my computer opertion system not found pops up.

i went to boot and set everything to default but it dose not do anything

and i dont have the boot disk can someone give me the filre for it

i have a phoenix bios
on advance it say i dont have a hardrive it says none
on optical disk drive it says avaialbe

[dairyman]

See KB article 321626

[john56]

didnt work

[programming_pat]

ok.have you checked all of the cablesinside the computer. Also how old is the hdd?

[patio]

ok.have you checked all of the cablesinside the computer.

No cabling for the HDD ...it's a laptop.

Do you have a Sony recovery CD for that machine ? ?
It will wipe all your data and restore the machine to Day One status...
If this isn't the choice you want post back with more info.

[dahlarbear]

1.  "dairyman" pointed you in the right direction, but we don't know which direction you took or how far you went.  What didn't work?  What did you try?


2.  The Microsoft article, 321626, lists the following causes:

This issue may occur if one or more of the following conditions are true:
•   The basic input/output system (BIOS) does not detect the hard disk.
•   The hard disk is damaged.
•   Sector 0 of the physical hard disk drive has an incorrect or malformed Master Boot Record (MBR).

Note Some third-party programs or disk corruption can damage an MBR.
•   An incompatible partition is marked as Active.
•   A partition that contains the MBR is no longer active.


3.  You told us:

i have a phoenix bios
on advance it say i dont have a hardrive it says none
on optical disk drive it says avaialbe

It looks like your BIOS does NOT see your hard drive but it does see your CD-ROM drive.


4.  You need to focus first on:

•   The basic input/output system (BIOS) does not detect the hard disk.

and possibly:
•   The hard disk is damaged.

You won't be able to access the drive until the BIOS lists and recognizes the hard disk.


5.  How does the hard drive attach to the laptop?  You need to ensure its power and data connections are secure and/or possibly reseat them.

With newer drives you normally set the BIOS to auto detect the correct configuration of the drive.  If you set it wrong, you'll corrupt the data.

[ale52]

If the BIOS doesn't see a hard drive, it's one of two things:

Bad hard drive
Bad hard drive controller on motherboard

Alan <>< 

[john56]

i opened the back to see the hard drive and it looks alright its monted on with a metal hingle like thing.

and im not really sure how to check if its getting power

i tryed the instructions but the first one said to talk to the manufactuars i dont really wanna do that right now just finished battleing microsoft about my 360.

and for the recovery disk i wanna check with you guys that all of them are the same?
if so i think i can bt the data get it on a disk

and about the auto detect thing i put on the exit section of the bios menu there was like a thing that said reset values to orignal settings and i tryed that but it did nothing

[dahlarbear]

1.  Can you give us the exact Make, Series, Model and serial number of the notebook?  I'm not that familiar with laptops/notebooks and I'd like to see if I can find some documentation with pictures from Sony web site or internet.  I'm interested in how hard it would be to reseat the hard drive in its connection and also what BIOS configuration information is available thru CMOS setup displays.

    Make:  Sony Vaio
    Series: ?
    Model: ?
    Serial Nbr: ?

2.  Similiar information on the hard drive if it's not too much trouble (otherwise we can wait on that):

    Make:
    Model:
    Capacity:

The manufacturer of the hard drive may have some diagnostic utilities that you can download and run to test the operation of the drive and the integrity of the disk surfaces (although I'm thinking you have to see drive in BIOS before you can access it.  If I'm wrong on this point, someone please correct me.)

You're probably going to have to try your hard drive in a known good machine, or put a known good hard drive in your laptop to troubleshoot this if "reseating" the hard drive doesn't help.

2.  What version/level of Windows XP do you have? 

    Version:  Home Edition or Professional
    Level:     Original, Service Pack 1 (SP1), or Service Pack 2 (SP2)

3.  Have you ever successfully booted this Sony Vaio laptop from the hard drive?  Basically have you been using it successfully in the past with its current configuration? 

I'm assuming the only configuration change is your reset the CMOS settings to their original factory defaults.

4.  Was the hardware recently worked on or modified?  Or did you receive it broken?

5.  In your first post you asked for a "boot" disk?  Is this a Windows XP setup CD, a Sony Vaio Recovery CD, or something else?

6.  I don't think the Sony Vaio Recovery CDs are all the same.  I would think you would need one to match the Make and Model of your laptop.  But who knows, maybe they have all drivers necessary for complete family of laptops. Somebody else might want to comment on this.

If you're talking about Window XP Recovery Console, yeah that's standard Microsoft stuff, but you might need a Windows XP setup CD of the correct Level, e.g. original, SP1, SP2.

7.  If you want to verify the laptop still works, you could try a bootable CD.  The following link for "MemTest86 3.3" gives you access to CD or floppy drive images that boot and run from their own operating system.

    http://www.majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d1247.html

    http://www.memtest86.com/

    http://www.bootdisk.com/