Missing operating system - can't reinstall Win 7

Hi everybody. I have been reading through these forums for about an hour now. You are a very helpful and highly intelligent bunch. But I haven’t seen anything to explain my specific issue and I don’t want to make it worse by trying the wrong thing.

My M17x has been working great. I’ve been playing Skyrim and that’s about the only thing I’ve been doing. The only changes I’ve made recently were to upgrade the graphics card drivers from the Nvidia site. That was about a month ago.

About 2 weeks ago it started doing something odd. When I would turn it on the fan would run but the screen would be black. It was getting power but no display. Also the keyboard lights would not light. I would press the power button again and the keyboard lights would light up but then the screen would lose power and the fan would turn off. I pressed the power button again and they switched again, back and forth.

I found that if I removed the battery and then put it back the computer would start normally, but only once. The next time I tried to turn it on I got the same black screen. I pressed the power button and the screen/keyboard power switching happened. I took out the battery and put it back and normal boot up.

This past weekend I turned on the computer and got “Missing operating system”. After doing a diagnostic startup it gave me PSA code 2000-0332: Error accessing the LCD inverter.

Further confusion: If I put in the Windows OS DVD it will give the option to reinstall Windows. But when I try I get an error that “Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing partition.” I have made some guesses at what might cause that but I’m no expert.

And so now I’m here looking for some friendly advice.

 

Hi Mydah42,

Need more information to help. Does your system have a RAID array setup, or just a single hard drive? It sounds like something is wrong with your hard drive. The 'Missing Operation System" error normally means that it can't find the ntloader. However, if setup can't detect the drive enough to setup a partition, that does not boad well. If you do have a RAID setup, you may be able to salvage the disks by breaking the array, but doing that you pretty much lose everything on it. If you only have a single hard drive, it sounds like it crashed hard. Post back with the specs of your laptop and we can go from there...

Rich S.

 

If you dont have a RAID settup, then this is looking like either a bad harddrive or a bad video card. I've been having similar while replacing a video card in my R2, but all the randomness of your symptoms really start sounding like a motherboard/hard drive issue. If you are not having artifacts when booting to the Windows DVD, then perhaps a combo bad driver plus corruped/failing hard drive is to blame. Sorry, the symptoms are very strange and overall it sounds serious.

Please list your specs. What model are you? RAM? GPU? CPU? etc. Then what types of hard drives? Some symptoms I have had with SSDs too. If you are willing to and have some spare pieces see what you can swap to test further.

 

Try resetting your BIOS defaults, if you have a RAID it may have switched to AHCI for some reason and that wouldn't let it read the OS.

How to enable RAID mode

 

Thank you for the comments. Here are the specs on my laptop.

Intel Core i7 840QM Quad Core, 1.86GHz (3.20GHz turbo mode, 8M Cache)
8GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 4G B DDR3)
1GB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce GTX 285M
640GB Raid 0 (2x 320GB HDDs)

I did reset the BIOS to default settings and got the same results: Missing operating system.

I noticed that the SATA Operation was set to AHCI instead of RAID. I changed it to RAID with RAID 0 enabled and restarted again. This time I actually got a useful error message that Windows failed to start. It told me to startup from the Windows installation disc and to try to “Repair your computer”.

Status: 0xc000000e
Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

I tried to startup from the Win OS DVD. It still wouldn’t start to install but this time I got a different error. It asked me where to install Windows and showed me 3 entries all on Disk 0.

Name - - Total Size - - Free Space - - Type
Disk 0 Unallocated Space - - 39.0 MB - - 39.0 MB
Disk 0 Partition 1: RECOVERY - - 14.6 GB - - 9.5 GB - - System
Disk 0 Partition 3 - - 1000.0 MB - - 1000.0 MB - - Primary

It wouldn’t let me use any of them because “The selected partition requires at least 11672 MB free space.”

 

do you have a desktop? i would just pull the hdd.. stick it in the desktop.. right click my computer -> manage -> storage -> disk management... from there you select the hdd and delete all partitions and reformat so it's ready for a fresh install

 

If you don't care about your data, this is what you do. Download the ubuntu iso (google) and burn it to a disk. Then shove it into your Drive (pray to god you have one) and when booting up, press the f12, 2, or whatever to choose the boot menu. Boot into the CD, and the Ubuntu screen should show up. Format the disk using a program called gparted and wipe your HDD and start afresh. (if you need more specifics go into YouTube and look this up, there are hundreds of tuts)

 

Before you go deleting your partitions...maybe you should call up Dell and have then walk you through restoring the settings for your RAID set up. I remember that once I messed that up on my R2 and there were a few things that I needed to reset, not just one thing.

It seems to me you should be CERTAIN you've got the RAID settings right before you go and wipe your HDD and reinstall windows...if for no other reason then to save yourself sometime.

 

Or send me a PM with your service tag and phone number. I'll look into it and set up a callback if necessary

 

Luis, thank you for the offer for more personal help! I'm embarrased to admit this, but I can't find the option to send you a PM on this forum. Can you send me a PM instead? Or you can e-mail me at [email protected]

 

click on his username and you will see the "private message" option.

Oops, just noticed you only have three posts...I believe you have to have five posts before you can send a pm.

 

I thought it was kind of odd that the PM option wasn't obvious. I thought maybe I had to be on his friend list or something. Looks like I need to go make a couple of random posts someplace.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sit...-send-private-messages-create-signatures.html

 

simple solution..... you need to load the raid driavers at the begining of the install process so that the OS can see your raid array. problem solved

 

Update:
After consulting a friend I decided to delete the 2 partitions in order to have space to install Windows 7.

Name - - Total Size - - Free Space - - Type
Disk 0 Unallocated Space - - 39.0 MB - - 39.0 MB
Disk 0 Partition 1: RECOVERY - - 14.6 GB - - 9.5 GB - - System
Disk 0 Partition 3 - - 1000.0 MB - - 1000.0 MB - - Primary

I deleted Partition 1 and 3. I was then able to install Windows. Now I find that I have 2 drives listed. Drive C: (14.5GB) and Drive D: (581GB). Windows 7 is now installed on C:. I found that all my original data is still in D: including the original Windows installation. I STILL don’t know why it started giving me that message “Missing operating system”.

Now I’ve got Windows installed on C: but that only leaves 144MB free of 14.5 GB. Drive C: is almost totally full.

It seems like the next logical step is to format D: and then extend C: to make it larger. When I started to format D: it gave me a message that: “This drive is in use. Another program or process is using this drive. Do you want to format it anyway?”

And so I’m looking for some more friendly advice.