Computer not booting correctly and no operating system found?

Question

What happened was my brother in-law accidently unplugged his computer from the wall when the computer was running. When he brought it to me (cause I was going to do some work on it) i hooked it up, and it wont work. It tells the boot is incorrect. So, I checked the booting in the bios and everything there is correct. Well, after I did that, it tells me there is no operating system to be found. The computer did have Windows XP Home Edition on it. I tried to boot from the XP disk, and it will, but when it tries to do a setup, I get a blue screen warning me that I have to stop or damage will be done....Anybody have an idea as to what happened when he cut the power?

Answer 1

Try this,turn your power button on to boot up your computer and all the while keep taping that F8 key,

Now you should be looking at a black and white screen,you will need to use you arrow keys to navagate down about four spot's "untill it says start at last sucessful boot attempt.

Hit the Enter button and you shold be ok.

Good luck

Answer 2

Did you check all the internal connections to the HDD? Does the XP CD find the HDD during setup? At what point does the CD boot fail?



Many times when transporting a tower system the disks can be bounced around and the connections come loose. A bad IDE connection can cause strange errors.



Also if the system is reporting "no os found" during the BIOS boot then check the CMOS settings for the primary HDD and be sure that they match the installed disk. If the settings are not correct the disk will not be read correctly.



Outside option, any chance the system was infected with a virus. Some virus destroy the boot sector of the disk and could be seen with these symptoms. Hard to cleanly recover from this, usual is a total reformat.



Last option is the worst. The HDD may have taken damage in transit and has failed.



Good Luck

Answer 3

That sounds like a hard drive or memory failure.



What I would advice is ...



1. Try to install windows again.

2. when you get to the blue screen, go down to the "technical information" line, and check if there is another line that says "***STOP: 0x000000XX" where the XX stand for two letters and/or numbers. (Examples: ***STOP: 0x0000008E , ***STOP 0x00000050, ***STOP 0x000000ED)

3. Once you have the "stop" code (0x00...) go to http://support.microsoft.com and search for the "stop" code. This is likely to return a Knowledge Base article, that describes the symptoms and possible causes and solutions for the problems you're having.



Hope this helps,



Ces



P.S.: Last known good configuration only works if, after seeing a blue screen (or having any other OS failure), you turn off the computer, turn it on and press F8 and select Last known good configuration at the Advanced boot options. But if you have already tried to restart the computer several times, and even reinstall the OS, this configuration is useless, since by this time the "last known good" has stored a corrupted configuration. Even so, if there is a blue screen while INSTALLING windows, usually the problem is hardware, not software.

Answer 4

possibly the disk that has your working gadget is not any longer recognized through fact the "grasp Boot" or the "grasp Boot Partition" disk. maximum stressful drives comprise utility that enables you to set a designate a small element of the stressfulcontinual to show no rely if thatcontinual has each and all the stuff that needs to be loaded into reminiscence, and run. i think of fdisk (an previous DOS software) could be waiting that can assist you you placed this component to your stressfulcontinual, or a minimum of verify to be certain what it is desperate to. this will not be what's inflicting your situation, yet i've got had this situation some situations while shifting disks around on my computing gadget, or after restoring a partition from a backup.