Hi guys,

I have a bit of a problem w/ my recently acquired TR 2A—it was not stolen :mrgreen:  Happened the next day that I got it.  And it reoccurs often.  When it turns on, sometimes, it goes to a black screen & say:

“Operating System Not found”

After few turn off/ on, the screen boots normally (have orig Xp Home)

Can you guys offer any advice?

I don’t think it’s the battery, as the time & all is showing normal.  Either maybe the previous guy messed up the recovery, or it’s missing some registry (from installing some programs), or maybe the HD is failing.  And I just got this too :(

Thanks in advance.

First off, I would verify that the harddrive cable is plugged in good.

Ishman

Another option is to check the boot.ini file.

When you boot to windows
Hit start—run—type in msconfig

Goto the boot.ini tab

Click on Check all boot paths

Ishman

It’s possible that the hard drive is having trouble spinning up.

Tks for the info.  Checked all the boot path.  Thay are all fine. 

Couldn’t check for the cables though.  Even w/ all the screws off, had devil of time trying to open the lid, so just put em all back to way it is :(

I would say, like out of 2/10 boots show that “No OS…” problem.

Still looking :|

Edit: Anyways to check/ correct for the possible HD spinning problem?

Most likely the hard drive is on the verge of failure. To be honest, I’d return it to the guy you bought it from if possible.

Try a reinstall of windows xp once and see if that solves the problem. If not, then as Drachen suggested your hdd is on the verge of failure and incase you haven’t already done it, make a backup of all important files next time it boots up successfully.

you may wann have a look at   Ultimate boot cd . This soft will check if there is any error on your hd. Just dl the soft, make a bootable cd.. and i ll scan your disc for errors
hope it helps :wink:

Doesn’t the TR series have a SMART disk drive? Any diangostic that can look at SMART statistics should tell you if it’s the disk drive.

So it seems that i m experiencing some HDD problem..
So i wanted to use that soft mysefl but ( coze there is a but :? )
The HDD test are only for
-IBM/Hitachi
-Fujitsu
-Samsung
-Maxtor/Quantum (not sure of the spelling of that last one.. cant read what i wrote on the paper anymore :oops: )

Since the TR HDD is a Toshiba.. which one of the mentioned above could match

tks for your advice

Little words about my problem: it seems that there are some bad clusters (i think that the way to call them) on my HDD. Because i can hear a ticking noise everytime i try to make a copy of a certain file. It sounds like there is a scratch… then if i hit a key or move the mouse…it frozes…
Beside that it works fine, so what should i do? Reformat the whole thing? Would it really help or should i just buy a new hdd…. santa already left.. i would have to wait a full year for a new hdd :cry:

help… help :cry:  :?
tks

Spinrite http://www.grc.com

It’s not cheap but it works really well.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I suggest. Google Aida or Aida32. Last time I looked, a freeware version was available. If not, see if you can find an old page with version 3.0.2. Install & run. Go to storage / smart. Look at the errors for your disk.

If it looks to you like one or two sectors is bad, then reformatting might solve the problem. Reinstaling Windows is not enough. You have to tell the install program to format the drive. The ticking sould you hear is the drive resetting the head, trying several times to read the bad spot. The formatting operation will detect the bad sectors and mark them unusable. There used to be utilities that would mark the sector bad for you without reformatting the drive. I don’t know if such utilities are still available, or how much they cost. You might try a little googling.

If you see tons of errors. then it’s not worth trying. You need a new disk drive.

Its rather rare that a disk has just one or two bad spots and everything else is OK.  As Drachen said, it is more likely that your drive is going South. But ... reformatting your disk costs nothing but your time. You never know—you might get lucky.

Hey,

So I DL Aida and did the HDD/Smart test. This is what i got.

Could you please help me to understand those results… are they good or bad news??

i knock on wood :cry:
tks for your help & time

Since everything in the Status column reads OK, it means everything is OK

well that s what i thought but just wanted to be sure…  :?

So does it mean i still have to reformat it? Or just ignore it

I’m not sure if that utility tests for bad sectors. Did it take a long time to complete? If it doesn’t test for bad sectors, it means you could still have them on your drive and the only way to mark them would be to do a reformat. Don’t take my word for it…let one of the more knowledgeable guys confirm this.