Hi guys/gals, hope this is in the right section. Today i was helping my Dad out. His computer is quite old and doesn't have a dvd burner, so i thought id give him one of my spares. I popped the side of and removed his old drive and replaced it with the new one. All went smooth, or so i thought. (I have done this before and know what im doing...or so i though, once again). I put the computer back together, it turned on fine...but displayed the "emachines" logo then went to a black screen with a white cursor. After around 20 seconds it comes up with the text "Operating system not found". Obviously this is bad, and leads me to think that the Hard drive has been wiped. Does anyone have an explanation as to why this happened? I really can't work out why it has. Also if anyone has a way of getting the data back (unfortunately i guess that's doubtful) id be really grateful. Thanks!
A simple fix, when the computer is booting up press the "delete" key. This will get you into the BIOS. Make sure that the hard drive is set as boot drive. Also check the back of the cdrom and make sure that, it is set correctly (master/or slave) , you can't have 2 drives as master or slave on the same IDE cable. Worst case scenario the cdrom might be bad causing both drives from being recognize. And finally if all that checks good, Do a chkdsk c: /f on the boot drive. If the windows system files are corrupted the drive won't be recognize. A simple chkdsk c: /f will fix corruption and make the drive bootable again. If the chkdsk doesn't fix it, you can download the free "testdisk" it has more powerful "tools" to fix corrupt drives. Testdisk also has an "addon" called photorec which can recover data from a corrupt hard drive. All your data is still safe in that drive (a few corrupt files will make the entire drive unreadable) , the only way you won't be able to recover the drive is if it's "physically" damaged.
Wow, thanks very much. Very appreciated. I've been on the phone to my Dad and there seems to be progress (which is GREAT for him haha). Thanks a million, i was getting worried there.
