Missing Operating System

I reformatted my computer and played with the partitions a bit earlier tonight and now my computer is telling me I'm Missing operating system at startup. I'm fairly certain that the issue is that my active partition is set to a free space allocated on my HDD. So I'm trying to figure out how to select what partition is active, but I can't find any way to do it in the bios. Every option I select eventually nets me the MOS message.

The system is an E1505 with bios A14. Any suggestions?

 

if you do a windows repair it usually will fix that.

 

you don't fix paritions in the BIOS, you need a command prompt to enter the commands. as nizzy says, i believe booting to your Vista disc will give you the option to repair.

it's weird that you knew how to break it and not fix it since the commands are identical.

 

i thought the same...he sounds very knowledgeable about it, so it surprised me that he didn't know the solution.

 

Well that's the thing - I may be able to sound like I know what I'm doing, but I don't Anyways, I'd tried booting my Vista disc (and have just tried again) and when I get thru the boot menu I get "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD.....Missing operating system_" I'd go down to my room to get my Dell XP CD to try, but someone is sleeping in there tonight, so that'll have to wait till morning. Is there any way to boot to a command prompt?

 

Did you give up at that point or did you boot from the Vista disc and try to run a repair?

 

You should be able to boot from the Vista disc if you press a key in between when "Press any key to boot..." and "Missing operating system" shows up.

My recommendation would be booting to a Linux Live CD and using a partition editor. If you are using an Ubuntu CD, you can launched Gparted from System > Administration > Partition Editor. Then edit the properties for your Windows partition and make it bootable. I basically did the same thing the other day and was unable to fix it from the Vista disc command line.

 

You did press a key when it said press any key right?

You should always be able to boot to the vista disc even with nothing on your HD.

 

This may help: when I reformatted I had hidden partition that was allocated for media direct. I didn't end up installing media direct, and grew curious as to what would happen if I pressed the media direct button with the computer off. This subsequently activated the hidden partition, making it's drive letter C: and pushing the original C: partition (which contained my OS) to D:. The computer was now looking for the OS on the empty partition. I tried for a while to switch the drive letters but found no way to do it. Finally, I discovered that booting to the vista CD allowed me to play with the partitions, and deleting the new C: partition and making it unpartitioned space moved the D: partition back to the C: partition, thus allowing the computer to "find" the operating system on the correct partition.

Not sure if it's quite the same situation, but I was up all night trying to figure it out, so hopefully it saves you a headache.