Windows OS not found

[ironzombie99]

My dad just called me and told me that when he turned on his OC it said windows OS not found on hard drive.

Oh boy i thought...I live two and a half hours away at college and cant make it home to fix it and its beyond his skill unless i talk him through it but i cant troubleshoot over the phone lol.

Its an older gateway, an essential 450 series.

My thoughts is to change the boot sequence so it boots from cdrom so he can repair the windows installation or use the gateway recover cd. But again i dont know my waya round that older BIOS off my head so i couldnt tell him where to go and also the cdrom is external and i think i ran into problems with it booting from usb drive before.

Windows 98SE
Gateway Essential 450
Intel (Tabor3) BX Motherboard R3

Way out of warrenty with gateway

[edfair]

This is the usual sign that the hard drive has crashed or the battery has failed and lost the drive setup info.
If it is battery you can probably handhold through the [DEL] [F1] [F2] [F10] [F12] or [CTRL]+[ALT]+[ESC] trial and error sets.
In any case this should give you a good excuse to go home twice, once to diagnose and one to fix.

[ironzombie99]

my dad left it off for about 20 minutes the went back to it and it worked fine. Sign of a HD going down hill or maybe the battery going bad?...It is around 5+ yrs old.

[bailey]

you might go into the bios and check things out there
is this a w98 system ?

[TwoRails]

If the CD (or other optical drive) is on the same channel as the boot drive, and it is having problems, it can make it look as the HD is having trouble. Unplug the CD / optical (if any) and see if that makes a diff.

[Mesaeus]

I think it's a hard drive failure, bios settings loss would still make the bios autodetect the hard drives since that's the default value for those settings since a few years.