'operating system not found' unless bootable CD in drive?

Question

Replaced HD in inspiron 2650...reinstalled winxp pro...works fine as long as 'bootable' cd is in drive...otherwise 'operating system not found'...I even dumped the partition and 'format c: /s' HD with win98 ... still 'operating system not found'   AAAHHH!!! help!   Dargoth11 Message Edited by dargoth11 on 11-28-2004 04:00 PM

bacillus · Answer

Did you remove the blade adapter from the IDE pins of the old hard drive and put it on to your new hard drive?

dargoth11 · Answer

Yes, I did. The reinstall works -windows is loaded on the HD and it works fine. But when I remove the XPcd or a Norton AV2003 from the CDROM and reboot the system I get the 'Operating system not found' error. I tried it with a non-bootable CD but 'OS not found'... changing CD to a bootable CD makes the computer 'see' the OS again.   Dargoth11

bacillus · Answer

Suggest you try booting up from the XP CD and then go into the recovery console and try the fixboot command.

dargoth11 · Answer

I tried that it rewrites the boot sector and still does the same thing when I remove the CD and reboot. dargoth11

bacillus · Answer

That's great news and something I didn't think about.

dargoth11 · Answer

I GOT IT! :smileyvery-happy:   Called Dell Support...simple solution...'load bios defaults' in setup screen. Easy solution just never occured to me. (duh!)   Seems that bios gets corrupted when boot order is changed. Manually changing boot order in bios screws something up.   thanks everyone for help.   Dargoth11

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