Operating System Not Found

Computer Forum General Hardware
1

i brought a pc off a friend for £65 here’s the spec:
Pentium III 450mhz
384mb SD 133 Ram
Ge-Force 2 mx400
3 month old 17" Philips Monitor
19GB IBM HDD

now everything was working fine on the pc when i got it home, windows 98 was loaded, but my friend had clearly shoved tones of shit on the pc, and it was filled to the brim with crap everywhere, so i figured right time for a clean format and reinstall of windows98

so i format: “FORMAT C: /s”
and i get: Insufficient Memory To Load Drivers or something"

so then i do: “FORMAT C:” it works.. and then i load XP but instead of installing on C: drive it creates a new partition “D:” and loads XP there, so i figure ahh well its only a server machine or whatever.. so i go into windows.. and i cant load anything because my 19GB HDD says its only 2GB!!!

WTF!? so i look at the pins on the HDD and they are correct for 16 Cylinder and 2GB+ (both C AND D read as 2GB limit), so then i go and remove D partition so i still have C left, and it still says: “no operating system found”

and i cant seem to find my HDD??

i then figured it was a naf HDD or a virus so i stick in a blank 15GB drive and it still reads as “no operating system found”

2

Might check the IDE cables and the connectors on the board. Having even one bent pin can cause all sorts of hell. Before the 75GXP line, IBM had pretty good drives. You may have to pull out the drive and check for the cylinders, sector, and comp stuff, if the ‘Auto’ settings don’t work…especially if BIOS was cleared too.

3

First I would check the jumpers on the HDD, and make sure they’re set right (Master on the end, Slave in the middle). Incorrect jumper settings can cause a drive to show up & even seem to behave properly, but have strange errors. I.E. you format a drive, everything seems OK, you reboot and the drive is unchanged.

Also, it isn’t necessary to do a “format C: /s” with an NT operating system such as XP. It will do the partitioning & formatting for you. Just make sure that when you get to the step which requires you to choose where the OS will be installed, you delete all existing partitions, and create a new NTFS filesystem using all the existing space. Finally, choose the NTFS partition you’ve just created as the drive Windows will install to.