Pardus 2011 Missing Operating System

[benwrench41]

Hi

I bought a HP laptop about 2 years ago and it was getting really buggy and slow so i deiced to reinstall it, so i put linux Pardus 2011.1 on. I put the cd in and rebooted, i formatted the disk and installed the OS, when it had finished i tried to reboot and striaght after the HP splash screen it said "Missing Operating System"

No other messages. I ran a memory check, both RAM and th HDD are working. I tried putting the Pardus cd and rebooting again, same message, i tried the windows cd that came with the laptop and still same message, i tryed going in to BIOS and changing the boot order, but the CD was already at the top. I went in to the boot up menu and selected "other" and still nothing, and ive tried booting from the HDD

My laptop is the HP Compaq Presario CQ40-512TU
S/N CND924325B
P/N VFO58PA#UFF

If some one can help that would be fantastic
Thanks
Ben

[rokytnji]

Missing Operating System" Error Message Appears On Black Screen

Try HP site. Maybe Bios is not recognizing anything

https://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...&product=95681

Maybe try a Puppy Live cd also and see if it will boot as a live session. I will be surprised if dvd drive and hardrive and bios all went bonkers at the same time also.

Edit: Might try a cmos reset also. By pulling cmos battery and re-seating it again.

Your manuals from HP

[benwrench41]

That what i though and i found that site before and i tested the HDD but i can do steps 2 and 3 because i cant boot from the cd drive, and when i try to contact hp they tell me my warranty has expired and send me to that same page ive been going round in circles all day

[rokytnji]

I edited my post above to give you links for HP manuals. You might try a cmos reset which will bring the bios back to stock condition. Hard to troubleshoot this over the net as it looks to be a hardware/bios problem.

[rokytnji]

Screw that. if your CQ40 is anything like this image for a CQ60 on cmos battery location. It is too many hoops to jump through doing a cmos reset . My cmos battery sits right under the laptop battery on my IBM. I don't know what HP was thinking putting the battery in the image below location.



Link I got image from How to disassemble HP G62 or Compaq Presario CQ62 laptop >> Inside my laptop

Previous address to get the above link from
Repair4Laptop: How to Upgrade, Repair, Disassemble a COMPAQ Laptop or Notebook

Out of ideas here, sorry

[MikeTbob]

If you can't get the system to boot with any LiveCD or the Windows CD/DVD's then you probably need to replace the CD/DVD drive itself. Just to check, try the boot CD/DVD on any other machine, if they work on the other machine but not yours then the drive is toast.

[benwrench41]

The Cmos battery was fairly east to get to, i unplugged it for a bit and put it back in but still same problem

the cd drive still spins up and was working perfectly fine and is recognized by the bios, and even if it was broken i dont see how it would stop a hard drive boot.

can i do a boot by a USD thumb drive? just a thought

[benwrench41]

problem solved

I booted up from puppy live and deleted the partition and started again with pardus

Thanks for you help

[jayd512]

I know I'm a little late on this one, but Missing Operating System can sometimes just be an issue of your bootloader looking in the wrong location for the / partition. For example, GRUB may have been pointing to sda1 while / was mounted to sda2.

Just something to look for if it ever happens again.