Operating system not found

**evecade** · November 20th, 2009, 03:58 AM

I realize this is the same as an old thread but I didn't feel like bumping something from like 3 years ago :P

I have this acer 5670 only thing I know about it was what I can see from the BIOS. I got it with the power cord and computer (Fixing it for someone). Its completely messed up, everything I do results in an error. The computer starts up gets to the acer screen where it asks you if you want to enter setup then after a couple seconds goes to a blank screen and doesn't do anything.

Boot from CD? Wouldn't change order. Had to enable the f12 to select boot device then hit f12 and select IDE 2 (Option to choose CD Rom didnt show up)

Once in the menu I cannot delete any of the partitions, cannot install windows on any of them due to errors (one of them is out of space when it asks to format it first I say yes and it gives me an error, one it says it doesnt recognize the partition and the other one just makes it crash with some sort of setupdd.sys error)

Run windows recovery and it says the path or file specified is not valid.

Yeah, I know not alot of information but w/e I do leads to errors lmao. Help would be very much appreciated. Thanks

Edit: If I take the windows CD out and select it to boot from IDE 2 using the f12 menu it gets past the acer screen but says

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM
Operating system not found.

I went into the bios and disabled network booting and it removed the PXE errors but still says operating system not found!

**CCT** · November 20th, 2009, 07:36 AM

Does this laptop still have the Recovery Partition? If so, <alt> <f10> on boot should activate it (you'll lose the data - this is a setting in Bios called D2D RECOVERY in the Main menu).

There may also be a 'Boot from cd' in the Bios Boot menu.

**Zonie** · November 20th, 2009, 09:08 AM

Welcome to Windrivers evecade. The first thing you might want to try would be to pull the hard drive and put it in another machine as a slave and see if you can access it. There is a possibility the HDD may be bad.

**evecade** · November 20th, 2009, 07:57 PM

Stupid question, but not sure if the cables are different but can a laptop HD be hooked up to a PC? Also, Alt + F10 does not work.

**CCT** · November 21st, 2009, 08:39 AM

That notebook shipped with a 100GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive (afaik).

So, the desktop needs Sata ports. After physical installation, during initial boot, you would also want, I think, to tweak the Bios so that drive ISN'T a boot device.

Alt + F10 has to be set in Bios to work (D2D RECOVERY) - did you check that?

**Zonie** · November 21st, 2009, 10:04 AM

Originally Posted by evecade

Stupid question, but not sure if the cables are different but can a laptop HD be hooked up to a PC? Also, Alt + F10 does not work.

Not a stupid question. If your pc is also sata, you can connect the cables to the #2 connection as the secondary drive. From there you can see if it can be accessed when you boot the PC. If your pc only accomodates ide then you can purchase an adapter like THIS.

**evecade** · November 21st, 2009, 07:43 PM

d2d is enabled, if I hook the HD up to my computer as a slave or w/e its called, and it is working and has a virus that is causing all these problems, wont that then infect my computer?

**Ferrit** · November 22nd, 2009, 06:18 PM

Originally Posted by evecade

d2d is enabled, if I hook the HD up to my computer as a slave or w/e its called, and it is working and has a virus that is causing all these problems, wont that then infect my computer?

It is highly unlikely that a virus is doing whats happening.
Also your fixing it, You should have good antivirus on your system anyway.