Missing Operating System

My boss just called to tell me that when he restarted his computer this afternoon, it posted the message

Missing Operating System

He says that he shut it down normally, but when he powered up the computer this morning he got the message. This is a 3 month old, high end, Toshiba notebook running XP Pro.

Any suggestions as to where to look.

 

He did not give you the complete error message and it would help to see the whole thing.

Possiblilties that occur to me are

- problems with boot.ini or other 3 system files that need to be on C:\ to allow XP to load

- BIOS confusion so the PC is not seeing the physical device

In either event, you gotta lay hands on the machine to try for a fix unless your Boss is lots more PC literate than normal.

 

You're right, he's not.... and he doesn't do a good job at describing problems. Have been doing my homework, but with mixed results. Did a web search for "missing operating system" and got LOTS of hits. Unfortunately, the "help" is uneven .... maybe even suspect.

The favorite culprit seems to be that the drive partition is no longer active. This sounds reasonable, but the suggestions for fixing it are to use fdisk. I'm not at all certain that fdisk is usable with xp or with ntfs drives.

I've never seen this problem before, and he was emphatic that all that he had on a black background screen was a doslike "Missing Operating System ".

Hope he gets it fixed before I have to deal with it.

 

He certainly could get things fixed. I certainly could flap my arms hard enough that I started to fly. Probably of the two my flying is the more likely.

This sounds like a possible except for the error message he is seeing but I still think a BIOS check first to make sure the PC hasn't gotten confused about the drive and then the recovery console stuff.

 

The good news is that the box is still under warranty, so.... off to Toshiba it goes. I'll follow up on this if I find out what the problem was. Thanks for your help.