OS not found on any devices

[grasswire]

That's the message from my older Compaq PC. Damn.

Any suggestions on how to revive this? No, I don't have a restore disk. Lots of family pics on the puter that I need to get.

[Lionessa]

1. Plug the hard drive into an extra port on a newer computer

and open it like an external hard drive and find your files.

[Gore1FL]

2. What Lionessa said. You may need to get one of these to do so:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156102

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

You can simply hook up your old drive to it and plug it into a USB port.

[grasswire]

5. I guess that means there's no hope for restoring functionality to the OS. n/t

[Gore1FL]

7. There was a command in DOS names Sys.com

I don't know if that existed in or after Win95. If you had a disk with e same O/S as the machine had you could boot to it and run that command.

If you could boot using a floppy (or CD) you could potentially access the drive without buying hardware, pull the data off and then rebuild it. The tricky part is not having the original media.

[BlueJazz]

3. Just curious. Can you hear your drive spinning and/or do you hear a clicking sound?

[grasswire]

4. nope

I hear nothing.

I thought perhaps there was a way to get to a place where the OS can be restored to a date prior to the crash. But I don't know how to do that.

[Gore1FL]

8. It might be a lose connection, then

It might be as simple as opening up the case and checking the connections.

[hobbit709]

6. What OS?

download and burn a Linux Live CD and boot from it. That will let you access the files on the hard drive and save them to an external hard or flash drive-assuming the drive isn't dead, just has a corrupted boot loader.

[grok]

9. two things...

it's not uncommon for one to lose their operating system. could be anything from having their hard drive as unmarked from being a boot device, file system being corrupted, hard drive failure, or even a virus doin havoc.

two, it's likely that most of your data is still there. however, if you play around too much without knowing what you are doing, you actually might lose it.

I will send you a PM.





.

[CK_John]

10. Most likely the mbr got screwed up. Here are several ways to fix. mbr

method 1:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/fix-mbr-xp-vista/

or method 2: (Requires floppy drive, access) Download WinME bootdisk and create a boot floopy. Boot and at prompt type:
fdisk /mbr

http://boot.oldos.net/bootme.exe