[Potato-VS-]

Well, as some of you know my family got a new PC a couple of months back. It's working well, the old PC however is not. My mom uses the old PC for mostly creating PowerPoint presentations and Word documents for the courses she teaches at university.

Yesterday, she went to go and turn on the PC. She was greeted with the message: Operating system not found.

I thought this was odd, considering that according to her the computer was functioning perfectly only the day before. I figured that a simple Soft System Restore would do the trick. It didn't. Then I figured on trying an Application Restore. That didn't work either. Now, I don't know what else to try appart from buying a new OS.

I should note that we don't actually have the Win ME install discs or floppies... I guess that the way the computer upstairs works is that inorder for a system/application restores to work some part of the OS needs to be intact . Anyways, if anyone might possibly know of a way of restoring Win ME onto the machine then I would be happy to learn of it.

I suppose I can go and purchase windows XP from a local store, but considering that it costs about $289-299 CND (for purchasing either the Home/Professional edition with SP 2) it might be better to fix the computer problem without going down that road.

[Hamese]

The restore disks shouldn't need any part of the operating system. In fact there should be an option during the restore that will format the machine and set it back to factory defaults.

If there are files you are trying to keep you could put the drive in your other machine and copy them over.
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[JtH]

EDIT* argh just reread your post and realized you dont have the recovery discs. if you dont mind, send me a pm with your os and what not and i will send you a recovery disk for it. you just have to make sure you mail it back once you are done with it.

well as hamese said you shouldnt need to have part of the os on the hard drive to restore.


there are only 2 things i can think of that could make this happen.

1.) your registry got horribly screwed up and therefore you are gonna have to do a total reinstall
2.) your hard disk drive died and therefore you are gonna have to replace this.

in order to boot off your recovery disks you have to go into the bios and change boot order. i think default it is set for floppy, then hard drive, then cd rom.

if it is a cd rom recovery that would explain why you cant get it to boot off it. your bios gets to the hard drive before the cd rom and hangs up. i think the key to get into bios is f4, correct me if im wrong. so when your computer starts up it goes through the self check. hit f4 there. it should bring up a blue screen with a bunch of shite on it. find boot order and change it so it reads off whatever type of recovery disk you have first. if its floppy, then floppy first, if its cd, then cd rom first.

then go to save changes and exit. your computer should restart with those settings and load the recovery disk.

if that doesnt work, then i dont know what to tell you. if it does work, then after you get everything installed just change the boot order back to floppy, hard disk, cd rom and you will be set.

this will only work if your hard disk is not bad. so try it and find out. if it still doesnt work i recommend buying a new hdd before getting a new copy of an os.

that way even if it isnt the hard drive, having an extra one cant hurt.


try it out and let me know how it goes.
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[rANCOR hUNTER]

I say get WinXP. Or anything but ME.
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[Greebo]

Bah - I thought this was a thread where you could win the author...bloody misleading titles.
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Most evil admin around.
Offical Ville songwriter.
"Captain Smart Ass"

[Stevo]

[Potato-VS-]

geeze you people are easy to trick!

I never though about the hard drive having died Jack. That could possibly be the issue that I might be having. I'll check the BIOs as well.

I'll post an update soon.