Comp Problems, need help please

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I'm working on a family members HP Pavilion computer. It says no OS found. Now I know windows 98 is on it, and when it was last turn off they say it was fine. However the last one to touch it was a 9 yr old with very nosey fingers. Before anyone ask there are no disks at all. I think they bought it used.

I couldn't even get the bios to even come up till I tried holding down the control key when first starting up. Then it pop up and let me into bios. When I exited it out though it takes a min or 2 then comes back to no os. It will not take a 98 boot disk. I was going to do a f disk and reformat the puppy but it doesn't reconigse it. Nor does putting in a window 98/2000/xp os do anything. Got any ideas?

What I do know about the comp,
Intel celeron processor 500 mhz
Phoenix Bios

When I put a boot disk in it says
the boot disk a non-system disk or disk error replace and stike any key. I set the comp to boot from floopy that still didn't help.

I really want to reformat this bugger.

 

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I'd do a reset on the BIOS to defaults first - just in case. But it sounds like the motherboard has gone west.

Make sure that boot floppy will actualy boot on another machine!

Harry.

 

Then of course check the floppy drive itself.

That may be why your Win98 disk isn't working. Without the floppy you won't be able to re-flash the BIOS if needed.

I always start by unplugging everything non essential eg HDD,FDD and any external devices/PCI cards (except VGA cards)

Then check you can access the BIOS. IF not chances are your mainboards shafted!

Does the Bios pick up the HDD?

 

Floppy's are not that reliable nowadays, mainly because the ones people have are getting old and past it.

Is the hard drive being detected in the BIOS?

Make sure the BIOS is set to auto detect for the HDD.

You didn't say if you were able to set the BIOS to boot from CD? If you want to boot from the CD, you need to make the CD the first boot device in the boot order.

You could try another floppy 'drive'.

Open the case and make sure all the cables are pushed in nicely and look at the motherboard for signs of bulging and leaking capacitors - that is a sign the MOBO is knackered, though it could still be FUBAR, even if all looks good.

 

Had similar on a machine today that suddenly wouldn't POST. I stripped it bare, checked all wiring to and from mobo - then removed CPU and RAM. Next reboot, I got a good POST. Then replaced CPU and RAM, reboot, and all was good.

Blame the nuisance pixies

 

Sorry about the lack of information. I do know better than that.

ok, when I first look at this comp at their house at thanksgiving. it didn't do anything but tell me no os was there. I tried putting in a window xp hoping it would let me reformat it that way. It actuall started going though the process, checking the system and stuff. When it got to the point where I thought it would give me choice to delete the drive or make a new one. It brought up that there was only one drive with so many clusters and it couldn't access it. ok, so I tried a few more things nothing worked. I rebooted the machine and it wouldn't even look at the disk after that.

now today I've have set the bios to all the drives. Didn't make a different. I reset the bios. Still didn't make a diff. No I didn't check a different floppy though. I have one on my desk top, I guess I'll dig that out of the closet and see if it helps at all.

I get my bios beep. I don't understand why I have to hold control key for the information on bios to come or for it to let me enter bios. I don't know why they can't set the bios up when your comp is toast to give you a little sign that says your comp is ****. Buy a new comp dumbass.

 

From what you say, maybe the hard drive is toast and the mobo is fine then.

We need to eliminate the HDD from the equation, so if it boots from the CD but can't access the drive as you indicated, then it sounds like a faulty hard drive or the associated cables. Have you got a spare hard drive to temp slap in there to test the theory?

 

What you need to do Mitzs is to get it to boot from a good floppy first and then use fdisk to fix the mbr.

I get this quite a lot now from our old Dell laptops. They start making ticking noises like the hdd is broken or stuck and then later it wont find any disk at all. All I do then is pop the win98 boot floppy in, bring up fdisk and then the fixmbr switch. After that it's as good as gold (for another 4-6 months at least).

Edit: another way I fixed this problem is to take the battery out overnight. Don't ask me why but it also worked.

 

I was advised to pull the hd out of the hp and put it in a different one. So that will be one of the things I try tommorow. Joe was off today so I decide to spend it with him instead. I will work on it again tommrow and let you guys know how it turns out. Thanks for all the advice guys. I will try them all.

 

That would have been my suggestion - take the HD out and slave it in another system, just to see if you can see ANY data. If you can't see the drive or any data, the hard drive is toast. If you can see data, take a different HD and put it in the HP computer and see if the HP computer can see it. This will check whether your mobo's IDE controller has gone belly up.