Working hard drive, but “Operating System Not Found”. How to make visible to BIOS

bioshard drivelaptop

I've recently been handed a 6 year old laptop (HP Pavilion ZD7000) that I want to repurpose for a family member to use. It was boxed and unused when it was given to me.

However, upon boot, after the BIOS screen it is showing a black screen with a cursor, with the words "Operating System Not Found" occasionally flickering up.

  • I've run the XP installation disk and all appears to install successfully; but, upon boot, same problem — operating system not found. Despite the fact that if I boot up from a Linux LiveCD I can mount the Windows partition and see that all of the Windows OS files are on there.

  • I've tried Linux and GRUB. I can format the whole drive, install Linux to disk, but still only get "Operating System Not Found" at boot. No GRUB, no nothing. But if I mount the drive from a LiveCD, all the OS files are visible.

So the hard drive itself seems fine. It's entirely accessible and I can read/write on it once booted from a CD. I can only guess that there's some hardware problem stopping the hard drive being visible to the BIOS, or maybe a problem with the BIOS itself? It appears that it's just not visible to the BIOS.

That's as far as my hardware/BIOS knowledge goes. Can anyone suggest what I might need to do to the hardware or to the BIOS in order to get it to see the drive?

Best Answer

One (or more) of three things probably going on here:

  1. The basic input/output system (BIOS) does not detect the hard disk.
    • The hard disk is damaged.
    • Sector 0 of the physical hard disk drive has an incorrect or malformed master boot record (MBR).

You could try testing the disk, but it's probably easier to slap in a new drive & save yourself the trouble.

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