I've got a problem

[andersel]

I( turned on my FS rig a little bit ago and was, after what seemed to be a normal start-up sequence, confronted with a black monitor screen with this line in the upper left corner:

missing operating system_

Last night when, I finished flying for a while I followed the proper steps to shut down both FS and Windows 7. After the shutdown was completed, I turned off the power to the bar into which all of my peripherals are plugged.

This afternoon I reversed the process and ended up with the aforementioned screen message.

Before today everything was working the way it should.


Questions:
1. Why might this have happened?
2. What are my options to deal with it?

Computer
DELL XPS
MSI mobo
intel i5 (3.2) CPU
nvidia 640GTX (4.0) GPU
RAM (12gb)
WD 500gb HD
(OS Win 7 64)
WD 2tb HD

Any advice and or opinion that might help me out?

LA

EDIT: I have the original W7 load disk, if that will be of any help.

[Tom Clayton]

I'd start with the disk and see if you can do a repair.

[andersel]

Thanks, Tom. Now I just have to find the damned thing.

LA

[Dangerousdave26]

I am going to guess you lost your hard drive but you need to test to know if that is what happened.

Go get Parted Magic and run some tests. It is a Linux distribution that is referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of Hard Drives.

You will need to be able to create a boot disc either CD or DVD it does not matter. When it boots to the CD you will see this screen. If you have a 64 bit machine select the Default settings 64 otherwise select the first option 32 bit. The whole operating system runs from ram it does not install to any drive.



Its going to go through a boot up process until you get to the Desk top. Give it time it might be awhile till it loads. The disk will eject when the OS load is complete.

The program you want is disk health. It will tell you everything you need to know about your hard drive.



If your drive is healthy and you can not restore the OS with your Windows disc, (if you have them most PC are no longer shipped with them) you can also try to recover or copy off files to another external drive as a last ditch backup before you are forced to reload Windows.

There is also an anti virus software there but you will have to be connected to the internet. It does not ship with any virus definitions and has to download them before you run a scan.

Good Luck

[andersel]

Dd26 -

Got a copy of Parted_Magic today and will be running it a little later.

Thanks for the advice.

I'll let you know what happens.

LA

[andersel]

Okay! Here's what's happened, so far:

1. I went to the Parted Magic website and DL'd/purchased a copy of the utility.

2. I burned/copied it on to a DVD.

3. I went to my FS computer to run it and...

4. The computer started absolutely uneventfully and seems to be running normally.

4. WTF?

LA

[Navtech]

Gremlins out ?

[AndyG43]

Possibly a daft question - did you have any additional drives (USB, Flash etc) plugged in on the earlier occasion? Mine sometimes throws a wobbly if I leave my flash drive in accidentally, as it's looking for the OS on it for some obscure reason (it shouldn't be, according to BIOS settings).

[Dangerousdave26]

For the fun of it. Boot up to the Parted Magic CD and check the hard drive health anyway. You may need to enter your BIOS and put the CD as a higher priority than the hard drive. If it reports anything funny on the drive you should use use Clonezilla to create an image of your drive as it is now. You will need an external drive large enough to hold the volume of your hard drive. There is a good amount of compression when you create the image but you need a large drive to fit it all.

Then it just becomes a waiting game for the drive to fail.

[andersel]

Possibly a daft question - did you have any additional drives (USB, Flash etc) plugged in on the earlier occasion? Mine sometimes throws a wobbly if I leave my flash drive in accidentally, as it's looking for the OS on it for some obscure reason (it shouldn't be, according to BIOS settings).

Andy -

I DID have a thumb drive plugged in at the time. I had taken it out when the machine started normally. There have been a number of occasions in which the computer started normally with the thumb drive inserted. But thanks. I never considered the possibility that the computer might try to boot from that drive.

I thought that, perhaps, it might have tried to start the boot sequence from a bad sector or sectors on the primary HD, but your idea makes a lot of sense to me.

LA

[andersel]

For the fun of it. Boot up to the Parted Magic CD and check the hard drive health anyway. You may need to enter your BIOS and put the CD as a higher priority than the hard drive. If it reports anything funny on the drive you should use use Clonezilla to create an image of your drive as it is now. You will need an external drive large enough to hold the volume of your hard drive. There is a good amount of compression when you create the image but you need a large drive to fit it all.

Then it just becomes a waiting game for the drive to fail.

Dd26 -

Man, I hope that it's not a failing HD because the C: in question is not even 1 year old.

As far as running Parted Magic anyway, to test the health of the drive, I'd already thought about that, but I'm sort of worried about what I might find out, y'know? I probably WILL do just that. Barring any more apparent problems it'll be a matter or deciding when to do it

LA

[andersel]

Navtech -

Thanks for the input

I NEVER discount the possibility/probability of gremlins.

LA

[andersel]

Thanks, you guys, for the advice. If it weren't for the help from my SOH compadres I'd still be sitting at my desk and staring at a completely black monitor screen.


You saved my butt!

Again.

LA

[gaucho_59]

Thanks, you guys, for the advice. If it weren't for the help from my SOH compadres I'd still be sitting at my desk and staring at a completely black monitor screen.


You saved my butt!

Again.

LA

In other words... save my butt... lol

I was running CFS2 all right on my rig... with Windows 7... and then it started running funny... sometimes Quick Combat ran but not Free Flight ... and vice-versa...
and then all of a sudden it opens... haltingly goes to the requested mode... but the planes are stopped in midair... motors running like at idle... guns work...
and it gets stuck... tried compatibility... and run it in W98 emulation... XP... etc. and it won't budge... Tried re-install.. and it goes fine until towards the end it
says it can't find a certain file...
My install CD is the original... when I bought it many years ago... do you suppose there is something wrong with it... and why did it run so capriciously...
I am at my wit's end... FS9 is fine... but no combat flying or missions there...
Anyone... please help... if possible...
Cheers,
G.