AGGHH! No OS Found on startup - BIOS setting?

ciaranr

I acquired an ex-corporate-network Fujitsu Siemens PII 350 and naturally would like it to boot. However, every attempt to do so has ended in a POST check, recognition of memory and connected disks and finally a "No OS found" message and thats it. Tried several cables, HDD's, Floppy's and bootable CD's but always get the same.

There was one of them non-resettable switches in the case, initially I ripped it out but I've since replaced it. Everything else is as normal. I suspect something in the BIOS is used to booting from the network? The machine probably had network management software.

Has anyone seen this before? Even an idea of what to google for would be a great help, I'm completely stressed out

Regards,
Ciaran

galwaydude18

go into the bios and reset it to default settings and see what happens!

thesteve

Everytime we handed out pcs from our office we wiped them clean, the license belongs to the office, not the person who gets the pc, just an idea but you might ask was it wiped before you got it? (just an idea, it was never stated if you're in the IT dept, got it from work, etc, etc)

Nukem

galwaydude18 wrote:

go into the bios and reset it to default settings and see what happens!

Bang* thats my answer

ciaranr

Thanks guys, but tried changing to defaults and a few different settings. Motherboard switches be any help?

darraghrogan

Install an OS

That is all

Darragh

harney

You could always download a live cd from Knoppix and boot from it to see if there is anything on the hard disk, but they more than likely formated the system to protect confidental data.

http://www.knoppix.net

Giblet

Get a dos boot disk. If you do manage to get into dos, type "fdisk /mbr" without quotes.

This fixes the master boot record, hopefully restoring you're operating system.

Alternatively try getting an OS disk and doing a repair install if you can.

thesteve

There's no point in trying to re-install or repair an operating system if you don't even know if there's one on the PC in the first place..... Like the lads have said, use a boot disk/cd to boot the PC into DOS, naviagte to the c drive (type c:) and check the hard disk (type dir). If there looks like a file structure, ie a windows or winnt folder, then there's probably an OS on the machine. If the dr command shows up nothing, the drive is wiped, or if the c: command won't let you access the c drive, then there's no partition on the disk, ie it is also wiped...

You need to know if there's an OS present before going about restoring it or troubleshooting any bios/boot problems...