[Skoal]

My wife's laptop just had this error message when she booted up. I cannot find her windows vista disk and need some help. Any suggestions before I try to buy a new OS or take it to a repair shop.

[Durahansolo]

Originally Posted by Skoal

My wife's laptop just had this error message when she booted up. I cannot find her windows vista disk and need some help. Any suggestions before I try to buy a new OS or take it to a repair shop.

Check BIOS and make sure that the Hard Drive is being detected. If it is then you'll probably need to find that CD (Master Boot Record may need to be repaired via CD/Windows Recovery Console), if not then the worst case scenerio could probably be a dead Hard Drive. Could also be the cables connecting to the hard drive not connecting well, or they aren't working as well as they should be (You'd have to open up the laptop and check). If it is not detected in BIOS you may have to try to get it to redetect the drive. I had this weird motherboard on my Pentium 3 that would sometimes detect the Hard Drive and sometimes it wouldn't and the same with the DVD Drive.

[Skoal]

Thanks. I looked in to BIOS and there is no hard drive found. I will take it apart later and see if it is disconnected.

[Feba]

In the mean time, you can download Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu ; burn it to a CD, and run it off the CD drive. It'll be a bit slower, since CDs don't read as quickly as hard drives, but once you boot it up you shouldn't notice that badly. There are OS out there that are designed to be run from CD, but they don't tend to be as easy to use as Ubuntu is.