Castanet

hey freinds i havent met yet...

One day I came home to my computer laptop saying "no operating system found" I bought my laptop from dell 3.5 years ago...no warenty left, and no OS comes with the laptop. it comes pre-installed.
i called in and they state it will cost me $ for them to send me a OS, or they can send a service call over and it will again cost me $..

Being so close to christmas i dont really have the xtra & to take it in to get it checked out (in the new year perhaps)

Soooo my questions are:

CAN any one give me ideas on how to try and at least recover alllllll my pictures at least?
It was windows xp home edition

I have tried to reboot in safe mode, by going into bios by pressing f12, and same ole' reply no OS found...

i have googled things over and over again trying to come to a solution, however, i am not a expert and get cofused.

please NO comments like...you shoulda saved your pic. or backed up...i know, i know, i truly have already cursed myself out, so need to carry it further.

i just wanted to get the pic out to make a calender for my dad that i do every year....could really care less about anything else on it

thanks for any good sincer help

you could try spin right.. it scans and attempts to fix the hard drive...

http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm

If I were to make a bet I'd say that your hard disk drive is toast, though it might be an idea to check and make sure that it is still properly connected to your laptop.

I did repair one once where all that had happened was it must have been dropped and the hard disk drive was no longer properly attached to the SATA connector.

I test suspected faulty hard drives by removing them and attaching them to a computer, then you can attempt to access data on it, often times though depending on the nature of the damage, they may not even be recognized, making the retrieving of your data next to impossible.

Does BIOS (boot up and hit F2, del or see manaul to get in) show a hdd attached? If not then hdd could be dead or cable/hardware issue. Can you hear the hdd running or worse clicking or trying to spin up? If BIOS shows hdd then maybe a MBR issue or boot partition (C: Windows) not set to active. Try running the Windows recovery disc if you have one or GParted Live will tell you if you still have a hdd. Best test as LoneWolf_53 suggested, try the hdd in another system.

not sure if my pm went through. if not, pm me

Is there a disc in the CD/DVD drive? Maybe you have a USB mem stick still plugged in?

That depends on the boot sequence.

Not sure who you pm'd, I got nothing. You should really post your progress here so other members can help and maybe someone searching for a similar issue in the future can find a solution -- that's if you solve it.

If you have access to another system get a copy of GParted which is free and make a bootable CD or USB flash. Set your BIOS to boot the CD/DVD drive or USB flash first or your BIOS might have a boot menu (ASUS is ESC key). You don't need to know how to use GParted, just load it and tell us if it finds a hdd.

Dell does have help available at the following link which maybe useful. It is a step by step approach

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/ ... egacy=true

hi friends.....looks like the hard drive is toast....
thanks for all the great suggestions

it could be, but usually when you get that message it means that the hard drive is recognized and it can't find the os. usually means that the file system is corrupt and a reinstall will fix...also your data is probably still there