Operating system not found!

[fettpett]

Hey Rock, is that true for PC's as well? I have a Compaq I bought but either the mother board or hard drive went. I have stuff on that computer I want to save like pictures of my dog when he was a puppy. And if so, is there a way to connect a PC hard drive with a laptop?

if it's the motherboard you wont it to boot up at all. if it's the hard drive it'll boot up and go through the memory check and you'll see a lot of stuff on the monitor till it tries to load the Operating System. at that point it'll tell you it can't find the OS.

If it's the Motherboard and not the Hard drive, you can take the hard drive out and put it in another computer.


and and FYI for all computer illeterate people DO NOT take your stuff to the Geek Squad, they are a bunch of overpriced idiots that can't do a whole lot or don't know how to. Find a nice little local computer shop and take it in there. They'll charge you less and they'll know what their doing (most of the time).

[Rockntractor]

Hey Rock, is that true for PC's as well? I have a Compaq I bought but either the mother board or hard drive went. I have stuff on that computer I want to save like pictures of my dog when he was a puppy. And if so, is there a way to connect a PC hard drive with a laptop?

You need a usb hard drive enclosure, I prefer a toaster type that you just plug the drives in the top. Some times the frozen drives will read, sometimes not. If they do come on for you, go to your documents and settings file and download it first.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153066

[Rockntractor]

Do yourself a favor and if you buy a toaster buy another hardrive with it, you can get a 500 gig for 50 bucks and back up all your pictures. You can even clone the drive in your computer so if you have a drive failure you can put in the cloned drive and lose nothing.

[swirling_vortex]

Hey Rock, is that true for PC's as well? I have a Compaq I bought but either the mother board or hard drive went. I have stuff on that computer I want to save like pictures of my dog when he was a puppy. And if so, is there a way to connect a PC hard drive with a laptop?

You could always boot a copy of a Linux live cd (like Ubuntu or Knoppix) and try to retrieve your files that way. Most distros come with NTFS support.

[patriot45]

You could always boot a copy of a Linux live cd (like Ubuntu or Knoppix) and try to retrieve your files that way. Most distros come with NTFS support.

Man, you computer geeks got a way with words! Its an alien language. I gave up on my old laptop but now my wife's Dell Vostros is shutting off sporadically when typing. When it shuts off, I just hit the on button and all is well, I'm right back where I was. It is inconvenient but seems like its something that will probably get worse. Anyone hear of this problem?
Running Vista.

[swirling_vortex]

Man, you computer geeks got a way with words! Its an alien language. I gave up on my old laptop but now my wife's Dell Vostros is shutting off sporadically when typing. When it shuts off, I just hit the on button and all is well, I'm right back where I was. It is inconvenient but seems like its something that will probably get worse. Anyone hear of this problem?
Running Vista.

Aw, it's not that technical. :p Linux is just another operating system, but it's split off into different "versions" of it (think of flavors of ice cream). A live cd just means that you can boot the OS without having it to install to a hard drive. That's why they're so handy at recovering borked Windows installs.

If your computer is shutting off randomly, it could be due to a number of problems. The first thing I would check is if it's a virus. If you don't have a scanner (or you have one with an expired subscription), you can get something like Microsoft Security Essentials which is free and it'll give you decent protection. If the computer is shutting down during the scan, you can boot into Safe mode (press the F8 key during startup until a menu appears) and try it that way.

Otherwise, I'd suspect it's a hardware problem. The computer is either overheating (the CPU fan may have stopped working), the power supply is on its last legs, or the actual power is unreliable. The former two you can replace and the third you can test by moving the computer to a different outlet that has stable power.

However, before you do any of that, you said that everything was resumed when you hit the power button. This could be a case where the computer is sleeping or hibernating automatically even though you have keyboard input, which is weird. Anyway, to turn off these auto settings, go to the control panel-->power options--change plan settings and for the battery and plugged-in option, change the put the computer to sleep setting at Never. Test this out for awhile and see what happens.