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I've recently been handed a 6 year old laptop (HP Pavilion ZD7000) that I want to repurpose for a family member to use. It was boxed and unused when it was given to me.
However, upon boot, after the BIOS screen it is showing a black screen with a cursor, with the words "Operating System Not Found" occasionally flickering up.
I've run the XP installation disk and all appears to install successfully; but, upon boot, same problem -- operating system not found. Despite the fact that if I boot up from a Linux LiveCD I can mount the Windows partition and see that all of the Windows OS files are on there.
I've tried Linux and GRUB. I can format the whole drive, install Linux to disk, but still only get "Operating System Not Found" at boot. No GRUB, no nothing. But if I mount the drive from a LiveCD, all the OS files are visible.
So the hard drive itself seems fine. It's entirely accessible and I can read/write on it once booted from a CD. I can only guess that there's some hardware problem stopping the hard drive being visible to the BIOS, or maybe a problem with the BIOS itself? It appears that it's just not visible to the BIOS.
- I took the drive out and it is a Toshiba MK8026GAX 80gb drive. I looked at documentation on the jumper settings, and the drive is currently in the 'No Jumper' state, so as far as I understand it should be seen as the master drive.
That's as far as my hardware/BIOS knowledge goes. Can anyone suggest what I might need to do to the hardware or to the BIOS in order to get it to see the drive?
i have just about the same problem out of a 7-yr-old Compaq; i managed to get Windows or Linux installed on it, then after a few reboots it can't boot from the hard drive anymore. never did find the problem tho. – quack quixote – 2010-01-23T17:18:20.273