So, my sis has a Toshiba satillite laptop and it was working just fine till yesterday when she tried to start it and thats when she got "the operating system not found error" message . Any ideas how to fix that ?

12/3/2006 11:56:26 PM

does the HDD spin up when you power on?

12/3/2006 11:58:47 PM

last month i booted up my laptop and the hard drive was clicking like a bitch and it eventually said "Operating System not found". it was fucked. i'm on my new laptop now and got a new HDD for that one.

12/4/2006 12:06:29 AM

back in the day when computers had floppy drives, that would often happen if there was a floppy disk in the drive and the bios was set to boot from A: before C:

12/4/2006 9:15:18 AM

1) make sure this isn't a cd in the optical drive, or floppy in the floppy drive (if she has one)
2) the hard drive is probably screwed

12/4/2006 9:28:03 AM

I would try taking a windows XP disc and use the repair option. Once you are at the repair command prompt type HELP and look at some of the commands. Try using "chkdsk /R" first and see if that finds any errors. If that doesn't find any errors use the "fixboot" option (maybe called something else check through the list) and that should write a new boot sector.

12/4/2006 9:29:53 AM

^
Don't do any of those steps if you aren't familiar with what they do (or find a more detailed article explaining how to properly perform those actions).

CD is in drive, possible cable loose inside laptop, or HD is dead.

12/4/2006 3:15:39 PM