Hard drive not found???

My Compaq presario has been very bad for the past two years. It started out with the stalling, the frezzing and finially the imminent failure detected by the hard drive. Now it simply says, "Hard drive not found" and when I put my restore CD(which never works) in the computer, it says this...

operating system not found

Windows Millennium Edition has detected that drive C does not contain a vailid fat or fat32 partition. There are several possible causes.

1. The drive may need to be partitioned. To create a partition on the drive run fdisk from the MS Dos prompt.

2. You may be using third party disk partition...

3. Some viruses also cause your drive C to not register. You can use a virus scanning program to check your computer for viruses.

The diagnostic toos were successfully loaded to drive C.

I have occasionally turned on my computer in hopes that the problem would magically disapear. Not knowing computers leaves me in a position of being very angry at American TV (Where I bought it), Compaq, and Windows ME. I took a basic class, but I'm no where near understanding this stuff. Can someone please tell me a solution to this problem???

 

Yes from my experience repairing thousands of PCs, the most problematic brand is Compaq and i wouldnt use one if it was given to me. Of course these days they are HP-Compaq. The only brand worth buying is Dell. The others spend all your money on the outside making it look pretty, and they put junk inside them. Unless you pay a lot of money of course for thier higher models, which are bad value.

I build my own PCs as i am an OEM, so i dont sell brands, except for laptops, which i only recommend Dell and Toshiba. Compaq laptops make thier PCs look good.

Your problem is likely to be a dead or dying hard disk drive and i would replace it if it is worth it in your PC. Note that if you buy a drive and your PC dies soon after, you could put the drive in any new PC you buy as a second drive. If you get a custom built one from a private builder (OEM like me, but not me i only cover my own area), they could probably use your drive in the new PC making the new one cheaper to buy.

The reason you get OS not found at boot with the recovery CD in the drive is

a) The disk (CD) is damaged and cant be read properly
b) You dont have Boot from CD as the first Boot device in BIOS.
c) Your CDROM is faulty

Note if you put a new drive in your PC, with your PC being older, it may not support the new much larger capacity properly. If it doesnt show the full capacity, you need to install drive overlay software BEFORE windows. This software is available from the drive manufacturer's web site. Alternatively you can buy an ATA controller card to provide this support.

Ask for more info where needed