Help! Windows Vista suddenly crashed, and now the operating system cannot be found!?

Avapxia

Hey guys I was just after leaving my laptop about 30 minutes ago, I closed the flap and left it. When I came back I saw that I had errors, I didn't take any notice to them really, so I turned the laptop off in the hope that everything will be back to normal. But after I turned it back on, after the initial loading screen came up, it said "operating system cannot be found" !! Does anyone have a clue as to what happened and how to fix this? Is this a Windows Vista problem or a hardware problem? ANy help would be appreciated!

jd83

if its windows this might help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

when you turn it on before windows start try enter bios and check the boot sequence to see it the hard disk is on the list

yoyo

I'd run a hard disk diagnostic man, think your hard disk mite have died...

Nick

Avapxia

rory1983 wrote: »

if its windows this might help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

when you turn it on before windows start try enter bios and check the boot sequence to see it the hard disk is on the list

Thanks for the link, it shed some light onto the situation. Yeah internal hard disk drive is there..

yoyo wrote: »

I'd run a hard disk diagnostic man, think your hard disk mite have died...

Nick

How do I do that?

AckwelFoley

somone needs to do a re install

yoyo

Avapxia wrote: »

Thanks for the link, it shed some light onto the situation. Yeah internal hard disk drive is there..



How do I do that?

Find out what brand hard disk is in the machine, google for that brands website, go to support and downloads, pick drive fitness tool or drive twest tool or whatever, download it and burn it to cd or whatnot, boot off it and follow instructions to test the hard disk Ultimate Boot CD has all these apps pre loaded if you would prefare that www.ultimatebootcd.com...

Nick

anthony4335

Most laptops have some sort of diagnositics built in, I know for a dell you just hit F12 upon boot up and you can run a full check ,this should pick up any problem with your system. I had a similar issue with a Dell 6000, with a samsung drive I put in last year, failed to boot for me twice, first time I did an full instal, ran for about 7 months then it happened again, ran diagnositics and it showed a problem with the drive.

Sherifu

Avapxia wrote: »

Hey guys I was just after leaving my laptop about 30 minutes ago, I closed the flap and left it. When I came back I saw that I had errors, I didn't take any notice to them really, so I turned the laptop off in the hope that everything will be back to normal. But after I turned it back on, after the initial loading screen came up, it said "operating system cannot be found" !! Does anyone have a clue as to what happened and how to fix this? Is this a Windows Vista problem or a hardware problem? ANy help would be appreciated!

Do you have a vista dvd?

mathias

" Operating system cannot be found " is almost certain to be hard drive trouble.

Tony H

you could try a new option thats in vista if you have the vista dvd , its called startup repair
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/5c59f8c1-b0d1-4f1a-af55-74f3922f3f351033.mspx
this might help if its not a hard drive problem

Capt'n Midnight

snyper wrote: »

somone needs to do a re install

only if all else fails or it would be quicker than troubleshooting

Could be partition table or boot sector.
Could be BIOS set to boot from IDE instead of SATA and visa versa or changing mode if using a HDD with built in FLASH

If it was XP you would be looking at booting from the CD and recovey console to see if you could see files on C: and then fixboot / fixmbr

You should be able to find diags on manufacturers site, finding a CD image is another story.

Avapxia

Hey, thanks for the replies. Now my laptop was running very very slow and couldn't really do anything so I got frustrated and fed up with it and installed a new hard drive that was lying around and installed a fresh copy of windows vista on it. Everything is perfect up untill installing drivers. Is there a proper way to do it? I downloaded the preinstalled drivers and utilities from the sony vaio website but some of the drivers folders don't have setup files, only .sys files - what do I do with them? I'm also getting a pop up alert every 2 seconds saying that my battery is not compatible with my laptop and it goes into hibernate then, and the wireless switch light won't go on even though I installed the wireless driver. I'm a noob at all this and any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Sherifu

You need to go to the device manager[hit start> type 'device']
Any unknown devices[usually yellow question marks] right click and install driver> fill in the driver location as the folder where you downloaded the installer/sys files etc.