HDD Not Found - BIOS, FDISK, and Bootup

[David_Jones]

Hi All,

I am trying to help a friend who called to say that their PC would not start up.

I went over and when it boots up, after the splash screen (HP) you get an error message:

"No operating system found"


I figured that they had perhaps deleted something important from Win98 (win.com or something), so I booted with a floppy disk (no problems) tried to find the C:\ drive, but couldn't get that to work, so I went into FDISK to see what partitions are on the disk.

FDISK responded with:

"No fixed disks present"


Hmmm...

Never seen this before, so I went into the BIOS, and checked the disk setup:

All are set to Type = 'Auto' (default)

Primary Master = None
Primary Slave = None
Secondary Master = LTN485S - (SM)
Secondary Slave = None

I am guessing that the LTN485S - (SM) is the CD-ROM (which also works fine, and I could boot up using a Win98 CD).


They claim (!) that the computer was working perfectly up until it did this, and that immediately before they were saving something to a floppy disk which froze. After switching off, and back on, they got the error message above.

My guess is that the HDD cables or connectors have fallen out or worked loose, since a total HDD failure out of the blue *seems* unlikely?

I don't want to get inside the box myself, else it will become entirely my problem (for which I have no time), plus they are happy to take it to a repair shop in any case.

Should I tell them to go ahead, and if so, what should they say to the tech?

My suggestion is:

"The hard disk drive is not responding and cannot be found by the BIOS. It was working perfectly before, so it might just be a loose or damaged connector or cable."


Does this all seem reasonable?

Thanks,

David.

[glc]

It's a connector, cable, or the drive has died. That's a proper description of the problem.

[David_Jones]

Thanks GLC - much appreicated.