Sounds to me like a hosed master boot record. If its running windows you *should* be able to boot off the cd and restore the mbr, if its linux you can boot off a rescue/install cd and re-install grub/lilo
Hope this help
Stuart
Hi Folks,
Your experience may help here. Today I was phoned by a friend who'd switched on her PC only to get the message "Operating system not found", together with the observation that "DHCP" and "MBA" had come up on screen.
The only special circumstance was that the machine had been left unused and switched off for just over a week.
So I went round and had a look. Switch on, and enter Setup. Check Boot Order: Floppy, CD-ROM, HDD, Network, and MBA-UNDI.
So decided that this was consistent with failing to boot off HDD and proceeding to try booting off the network ("DHCP") which failed (since no network) and then "MBA-UNDI" (whatever that is).
So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened.
Provisionally, therefore, thought that the week's off-time had resulted in the CMOS battery draining, so that it had lost its data which were somehow restored when I went into Setup and poked around.
But then it occurred to me that if that were so, then the CMOS clock should have the wrong time (e.g. some hours or days slow).
Not so: in fact it was 5 minutes fast. So that seems to not favour my hyptohesis.
Leaving me wondering what might really have happened. The only thing I did was have a look inside the Setup and re-boot, not altering a thing.
Any ideas?
With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-06 Time: 22:00:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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