Hi everyone,

Where I work we have a computer that was coming up with loads of junk like pop ups, redirects when opening IE, etc. I ran BPS Spyware Remove to see what I had on the PC, and it detected about 15 objects and as I pressed the button to delete them, the system restarted and came up with the "Operating System Not Found" error. No matter how many times I turned the power off and on, restarted or anything, the same error showed up. (This was last Thursday).

The computer was turned on on Monday (because the woman that uses it forgot about the problem) and the computer seemed to work ok, except that every office program was performing illegal errors as were a few others. Our IT consultant decided that after what it had been thru, and the problems I had previous to this, it would be best to do a fresh install. I did this, going thru the formatting, installing Windows XP Professional back on, installing Office, and all the other programs we use at work. Just as I was configuring an email account in Outlook, the computer restarted itself again, and once more the "Operating System Not Found" came up, and I was back to square one - and once again, it happened again today - works fine until restarts without warning and error message.

Anyone got any ideas on this please?

n.b. The system runs on Windows XP Professional and is linked to a LAN, on which no other computers are affected.

here's some stuff to look at: first thing that popped up when i looked was hard drive failing. what kind of drive is it? maxtor has a diagnostic tool here:

powermax

if you don't have maxtor perhaps your manufacturer will have some utility on their site.

anyway here is a google search

google search

after more reading of the search i posted most everything points to a hard drive problem.

here is one suggestion made:

Recovery console is essentially a low-level (Like Dos) ability
to do basic commands. You insert your XP CD-ROM and
boot to the disk. One of the options will be to run the console.
It will prompt for the Administrator password, which should
be Null (Empty). You will be at a prompt. To perform the
disk check you would type CHKDSK C: \R
A Chkdsk will only scan your drive for any errors (Cross
Linked files, etc..) A \R (Repair) will take a fair amount of time
30-45 minutes. After it completes your disk should be marked
as "Clean". If it was a disk error causing your inability to boot
you should be able to run XP. This operation does not effect
your install.

and here is microsoft's data base:

"Operating System Not Found" or "Missing operating system" error message when you start your Windows XP-based computer

Thanks a lot - I'll give them a go today at work.

Could a nacked Hard Drive be the reason for the random restarts though?

run CHKDSK /F (whatever happened to marking bad sectors? ie W98) check the IDE lead is securely fitted.

Is NTLDR and the OS on the same partition? Cos it seems NTLDR is running it's the passover to the OS that's glitching, actually no it's not - cos you're getting restarts...

Check all leads internally, get a sparkie to check the PSU outputs whilst you knock it, maybe the drive power is failing sometimes and sometimes the whole systems power.

Alternately employ that woman to swwitch it on <beg>

sorry to tell you this but the longer this keeps up, the more operating system not found will be displayed, and will get hard to boot up correctly, i suggest you replace the HD, becuase I had nasty exp with this