Operating system cannot be found?

[1_21Guns]

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljdl5kv1qP1qca5juo1_500.jpg

This is the second time I've had this now after I've fallen asleep with my laptop on, and I have no real clue what it means, anyone else had it before or know how to sort it? I'm thinking trying to reset it to factory defaults, but I haven't actually got a clue.

Thanks.

[Kaius]

From my knowledge of this, your hard drives about to fail for whatever reason. How long have you had the laptop, is it still under warranty? Save everything you need and try and factory restore it like you said, if its not working after that then follow this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

See what happens, but when it happened to both of mine they had to be replaced >.<

[1_21Guns]

Oh shit, my warrantys run out now, it wasn't even fucking doing that until I had to take it in to get my keyboard fixed... fucking hell.

Thanks Aaron

[ManyPearTree]

Try booting it from the CD to see the status of the HDD or other possible components..

[anonymous.john]

Media test failure: Your hard drive was not detected. This is different from the operating system being corrupt. The computer thinks that the hard drive is physically disconnected. Your HDD is probably dead because it's a laptop. There's not a whole lot you can do about that other than get a new hard drive usually. I don't know what would have caused this, but I've had it happen before as well.

[TheMatrix]

My theory is that your HD overheated. But it shouldn't have. Is one of your fans broken, perhaps? Or did you put it under a blanket? Poorly designed airflow inside the laptop?

Hmmm...................... :/

[MattVon]

This is the second time I've had this now after I've fallen asleep with my laptop on, and I have no real clue what it means, anyone else had it before or know how to sort it? I'm thinking trying to reset it to factory defaults, but I haven't actually got a clue.

Thanks.
Clearly your laptop is not looking so good, the most likely possibility is hard drive failure as the others have said. The best bet is to save all important documents from the hard drive as soon as possible, you can achieve this multiple ways.


Use Ubuntu Live CD
Connect the hard drive to a PC (depending on the laptop, will depend if you can remove the hard drive without taking the laptop to bits)


There's many other ways but they're the top two ways I use. To check the hard drive status I would recommend HD Tune Trial (http://www.hdtune.com/).

Depending on your laptop and your budget, if you a dependant on this single laptop and you have no other spare to use, rather than buying a new laptop it's best to get a 2.5" HDD replacement; your choice.

[Silentsilver]

How old is the laptop? Drive could possibly be going due to some bad sectors, I would pop in your windows disk and do a chkdsk /r and then run a disk check program like Seatools or the western digital program to make sure everything is in check