Hi everyone, I got home today and tried to start up my sony notebook. When I powered it up it brought up the windows XP screen where the little lines move horizontally while it loads. It stayed at that screen for quite a while, like 6-7 mins, then flashed a blue screen and rebooted. when it rebooted it said "operating system not found" it has said that before, and it cost quite a bit to get fixed. I unpugged the computer and tried to start it again, and this time it said something like invalid boot.inl or something. i went back and tried to hold f8 and it gives me options like safe mode or last know good configuration, but no matter what i choose it just freezes. It gave me the " operating system not found" message a few weeks ago, and i thought "here we go again" but i restarted it and it has worked fine till now. If you have any idea what i could try to get it to work it would be greatly appreciated. or if you have any idea what the problem itself it i would be greatful to know that also. Thank you very much in advance, Burner413
try booting your computer from the windows xp disc, then run the repair command. Windows setup should run a DOS style command prompt, into which you can type HELP and get a list of commands to use. Don't quote me on this, but I think the one you are looking for is FIXMBR. This will write a new master boot record and boot.ini file and hopefully fix your 'operating system not found' problem. You won't lose any data or anything. If this doesn't work, go back to the repair console and try FIXBOOT instead. It will step you through adding windows back onto your boot record. Hope I helped.
hey, thanks for the reply, i must have omitted it in my post, but i dont have a repair disc, my notebook came with 5gb reserved for the disc built in. Even if i could get another copy, my cd drive will not read cd's, but for some strage reason it reads and writes dvd's fine. Any ideas what i can do? oh my computer doesnt have a floppy drive either..... honestly, it sounds like the powers that be just dont want me on my computer lol.... Thanks, burner413
if you have a USB pen drive or something similar then you might be in luck. do a google search for 'boot windows from usb drive' or something like that, and you should come across people who have collected the necessary files to boot from a USB disk. Download them, put them on the USB disk, and try to boot with that instead of the cd.
@burner413 Booting from a USB drive is a great option but, it will only work if your bios supports that feature and if so that you have the USB drive in your boot order.
well, sadly that presents another problem, I can't get to my BIOS, all my computer will do is bring me to a screen with a few options like safe mode or start normally, holding f10 doesnt do anything anymore, as it use to bring up my BIOS, so I cant even re arange the boot order. I have called a few people and they all say it sounds like my hard drive is bad, which seems weird cuz my old one went bad and i had a new one installed like 6 months ago. Wow, this is seeming more and more hopeless everyday.... Thank You Very Much for Your Responses Though, burner413
Well I think its come to pick a remedy. a) send it in for repairs b) find a large cliff, and hurl it off Lol
If this same thing happened before, Check your power supply as It may be causing problems... Dumb question... Are you keeping it near any large magnets?
I am not keeping it near any magnets, but now that you mention it, my power outlet on my computer is a bit messed up, like my power adapter will not stay in, and the actual outlet itself moves back and forth because when i sent it in to have it fixed a few months ago, they cracked the casing that surrounds it and holds it in place. It occasionaly shorts out my power cord but all i do is unplug it and plug it back into the wall and it works. COuld this really have caused my problem?
Well, it could have caused a short and fried some connectors, the HD itself, or even more things than that. Other than tell you to have it serviced by a pro, i wouldn't know what to advise on this, other than trying to get your hands on a windos xp dvd to try and repair the boot.ini . Also, keep in mind that any computer with a built in recovery partition usually offers you the option to burn a recovery disc in case of HD failure, so if you do get to fix this without switching drives or having it serviced, make one so that next time, you can save yourself a lot of headaches. Anyways, good luck with it.
