A mate asked me to have a look at his laptop for him(he said he tried a few things on it but wasn't sure what)I know, not much help. I tried to restore all defaults in the setup menu but no change. When turned on it gives a screen saying non system disk or disk error relace and press any key to continue. My first thought is the hard drive is shagged but I knew I could come here to ask if anybody knows if I'm right or how to fix it. It's a HP notebook model number :compaq nx6325 with 512Mb ram.
Sounds like you got a floppy disk in there, or something of that nature. Check all your usb ports and floppy drives. The laptop is trying to boot from a device that's not the hard drive, so check the boot order as well.
either the hard drive crapped out or windows crashed. check in the bios to see if the drive is seen. system specs link. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12447_na/12447_na.HTML
If the system files have any corruption, the hard drive will be showing as "raw" or invalid file system. You will get the warnings you see. Most people will think the hard drive is bad, but just a few files being corrupted will cause the problem. Your best bet is to do a chkdsk c: /f on the hard drive. This will fix any file corruption and will hopefully bring the hard drive back to life. I've encountered this problem several times (cause by improper windows shutdown) and a chkdsk has always fix the computer to where it was bootable again. The worst thing you can do is reformat the hard drive and reinstall windows. All the data is still intact and recoverable.
I ran the memory test and HDD test in the setup and they were both successfull. So I gather the harddrive is ok. How do I perform the chkdsc option? I also changed the setup to boot from the HDD first and the cdrom second and optical disc third.
change the boot sequence so that the rom drive is 1st & the hd is 2nd. boot off the windows cd & click on the repair option. at the c:\prompt, try chkdsk c: /f or chkdsk /r
Also you can make a bartpe (all you need is the free bartpe software and the windows installation cd). The bartpe will bootup the computer and from there you can use the command line (run box) to type chkdsk c: /f. Thats how I always run my chkdsk.
Thanks very much for the help. Turns out he bought this from ebay and the operating system was in Arabic or something and gave the error when he restored the defaults, so I used a bootable version of winXP and reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled winXP and the laptop is working fine now. Thanks again for the help
