The good lady's laptop has somehow lost it's operating system. She called me in because her password would not work, I check my note book and she was using the correct password. I went to bios-system-security and we changed the password. it now works but tells us no operating system found. so I went to boot set up and it shows that there is no operating system. I did a quick check on the harddrive and it passed. I stuck a DVD with a ios on it in the dvd drive and the drive does not start up. I get a box saying no operating system, install operating system. At the moment I am at a lost at what to do. Any sugestions?

Which OS was on it? Mostly happens with windows and android. You might wanna reset the boot section in the bios to try the rig to boot from usb or dvd. In most cases it means the partion has been whiped.

Cromag wrote:

In most cases it means the partion has been whiped.

That would imply that something was done to wipe the partition. I would think it more likely that the drive is not being read properly, perhaps can´t be read. The machine is old, isn't it Dinga? So one must recognise the possibility that the drive is dead or dying.

If the machine is not booting from a bootable DVD, then it is not finding, or not looking for, the medium during boot. Are you sure that the DVD drive still works? When was it last used?

If you are sure the DVD drive works, and the medium in it is definately bootable and ok, and the drive is not starting at boot, then I think the problem must be in the BIOS. That is to say, the problem with the DVD medium, not the message that there is no operating system.

Resetting the BIOS as Cromag suggested may help. It can't really hurt, either. The machine is apparently pretty comprehensively broken, so resetting the BIOS is unlikely to make things worse.

Have you, in the past, sucessfully booted the machine from a USB medium? If so, do you have a bootable USB medium at hand? You could try that.

If you can get the machine to boot from a DVD or USB, the question is whether the hard drive is being fouind or not. If not, and if the machine is old as I assume, then I think it is highly possible that the drive is at least sick and maybe dying or dead already.

If you can determine that the machine is otherwise ok but not finding the drive, i.e. get it to boot from a bootable DVD or USB, you could try putting the drive in an external exclosure to see if another machine can mount and read it. If that works, the problem is in the hardware of the machine (probably, I think 😉 ).
You can then at least acces any files that are on there.

Or maybe it is really a corrupt partition. If you can get the machine booted from a bootable medium, or get the drive mounted from an external exclosure on another machine, you might be able to save something with a partitioning tool that is smart enough to block bad partitions. However, if the drive is starting to have bad blocks in a big way, I wouldn't be trusting it for important things.

Think he's talking about his wife's brand new laptop that's having the issues.

Yes GB is right this is a new laptop bought it in Oct/Nov 2017 for the good lady, I never use it, except to install what operating system she likes. I belive I had to do something different to install a linux system on it. But cannot rember what it was I wrote it down somewhere I don't remember where. This getting old sucks I can rember what happened 50 years ago no proplem, but damn if I can remember what happened last month.

I think the last install of a linux OS messed things up. I'd really reset the bios again, boot into a live usb, install something and also make sure grub is installed.

Cromag wrote:

... also make sure grub is installed.

Yes, meant to have mentioned that.

And yes, looks more and more like the first step is to get it to boot into a live USB or similar, and have a look at the drive. Or just re-install.

nubimax wrote:

...damn if I can remember what happened last month.

Maybe it would jog your memory if you read back through your thread about the new laptop here
click this link

To get into the UEFI settings of a "HP Pavilion - 15-cc023cl" Press the Escape key repeatedly while and after pressing the power button.
From there you should be able to change boot options (legacy or not, which device to boot from, etc)

What OS is installed on that laptop?

Thank's everyone for your help. I finely got into BIOS about 6 hours ago and found that legacy was disabled, efi was disabled among other things and using the sparky dvd I found grub and swap were gone. At that point I installed Sparky 4.9 xfce and the laptop is up and running. only one small problem left to fix, before you can get to the operating system you have to use the Admin. pasword then Sparky comes up and you can enter the password for sparky and you are there. In the morning when I can see better I will go into BIOS and see if I can change that.
dinga