went home from college yesterday and turned on my pc and when it tried to boot up it said it couldnt find an operateing system so after a while i took out the hard drive from my old pc and put it in my new one and it still said it couldnt find a operateing system.does anyone know how to fix this.also im planning to get a new hard drive and windows xp at the end of the week.my pc is a pentuim 3 and the prosessor's speed is about 450-500 will xp work on it

went home from college yesterday and turned on my pc and when it tried to boot up it said it couldnt find an operateing system so after a while i took out the hard drive from my old pc and put it in my new one and it still said it couldnt find a operateing system.does anyone know how to fix this.also im planning to get a new hard drive and windows xp at the end of the week.my pc is a pentuim 3 and the prosessor's speed is about 450-500 will xp work on it

I put XP on a P3 550 on Sunday with no issues.

Sounds like the hard disk might be knackered. If you've got another computer which works, you can put the hard disk in as a slave, then try running scan disk, etc. and it might be able to sort things enough for you to grab important stuff off it.

If you don't have another computer to do this with, if it's Win9x get a bootdisk and you can start it up off that and run scandisk, if you're using W2K then try booting off the CD and running a recovery.

I've run XP on a P3-500 with 256Mb RAM, and it worked fine. Should imagine a P3-400 wouldn't be that much slower, but I wouldn't use less than 256Mb RAM...

Rob.

Hmmm, last time that happened to me, the hard drive had gone titz up.

Ran XP on a PIII-450 before without any problems.

Sounds bad if the computer is not recognising a second hard drive as well. Could be the mother board. I run Windows XP on a 400 MHz Cyrix chipped notbook with 60Mb of ram. It works but is slow. My Office PC is a PIII 600 with 256Mb ram and 130GB of HDD space (original 10 and new 120 GB drive). It works fast enough once booted up but is bloody slow booting compared with my 2.2 GHz Celeron home PC.

Just a thought, go into the Bio SETUP programme and make sure that the option to boot from the HDD has not been disabled.

Once you've checked the bios double check the cables connecting the hard drive and mother board are not loose.

Sounds bad if the computer is not recognising a second hard drive as well. Could be the mother board. I run Windows XP on a 400 MHz Cyrix chipped notbook

Cyrix chipped? Do they do Skodas as well?

Cyrix chipped? Do they do Skodas as well?

Afraid not, the puter is so old it came from a time when you had Intel, AMD and Cyrix as CPU manufacturers.

Min spec for XP is 64mb ram,P11 233. I have one with P11 350 and 128ram with XP. As with the problem go through the above suggestions but wots the PC spec? OS etc.

Well my Notebook PC has 64MB ram fitted, but 4 is used for garphics so the OS reports 60MB as system Ram. As I say XP runs but is bloody slow. I also found this with 128MB on my office PC. Fitted another 64 and was not to bad. Once I upgraded to 256 the running speed is fine, but as I say takes a long time to boot up.

also you can turn off all the pretty visuals and go into system properties, advanced, startup and recovery, edit and tag /nogui on the end of the line which usually reads "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut" and that cuts boot time down. Can also remove most the crap from msconfig too (start, run, msconfig, startup).

Suggestion - Check the pins on the IDE cable, make sure they haven't broken?

what OS are you running?

is it a bluescreen about unable to load.. or a black background?

Sigh, people on here really either can not read or just do not bother. To quote:

"went home from college yesterday and turned on my pc and when it tried to boot up it said it couldnt find an operateing system so after a while i took out the hard drive from my old pc and put it in my new one and it still said it couldnt find a operateing system.does anyone know how to fix this.also im planning to get a new hard drive and windows xp at the end of the week.my pc is a pentuim 3 and the prosessor's speed is about 450-500 will xp work on it"

So for you who said it sound like the HD is fooked, I will point out he tried a different drive and it also was not recognised. This suggests the problem is not the drive.

For Neo VR he quite plainly says the error is the one in which it says it can not find an OS (eg like the one you getif you reboot with a non system floppy in Drive A). So it is a black screen.

As I suggested it is either the IDE controller on the MB, the cable as others have suggested or the Bios is wrongly configured as I suggested.

For Neo VR he quite plainly says the error is the one in which it says it can not find an OS (eg like the one you getif you reboot with a non system floppy in Drive A). So it is a black screen.

William, william, william...

Windows NT (and i think 95+98 too) insist on all its major boot files being in the first 2gb of the partition. if one of the files is moved outside this area (ie it gets updated by a patch) windows will try to boot, but will bring up an error. (Inaccessable boot device on NT - on a bluescreen)

its rare.. but it happens

he quite plainly says the error is the one in which it says it can not find an OS (eg like the one you getif you reboot with a non system floppy in Drive A). So it is a black screen.

Now that makes me wonder if there is a CD in the drive and it's not specifying the letter of the relevant drive.

I'd be tempted to temporarily disable booting from all drives except the hard drive to bypass this problem (especially if the drive thinks it has a disk when it does not).

Sigh, people on here really either can not read or just do not bother....So for you who said it sound like the HD is fooked, I will point out he tried a different drive and it also was not recognised. This suggests the problem is not the drive.

What he actually said was:

"i took out the hard drive from my old pc and put it in my new one"

which seems to suggest to me he tried the same hard disk in two computers, and it didn't work in either.

Which would mean it's nothing to do with the motherboard, and much more to do with the common factor, ie. the disk.

If you're going to throw stones, make sure you're not in a glass house...

Rob.

William' date=' william, william...

Windows NT (and i think 95+98 too) insist on all its major boot files being in the first 2gb of the partition. if one of the files is moved outside this area (ie it gets updated by a patch) windows will try to boot, but will bring up an error. (Inaccessable boot device on NT - on a bluescreen)

its rare.. but it happens [/quote']

I know but to get this the system would have to be starting to boot. Again unlikely as an alternative HDD produced the same error.

What he actually said was:

"i took out the hard drive from my old pc and put it in my new one"

which seems to suggest to me he tried the same hard disk in two computers' date=' and it didn't work in either.

Which would mean it's nothing to do with the motherboard, and much more to do with the common factor, ie. the disk.

If you're going to throw stones, make sure you're not in a glass house...

Rob.[/quote']

He means he took the HDD out of an old PC and put it into his newer one. Why would he want to upgrade the PIII machine if he has a newer PC?

He means he took the HDD out of an old PC and put it into his newer one. Why would he want to upgrade the PIII machine if he has a newer PC?

Why would he want to buy a new hard disk if he's already got one?

Rob.

More space. My office PC had a good perfectly functional 10Gb HDD. I wanted/needed a bigger one, now has a 120BG one as well.

More space. My office PC had a good perfectly functional 10Gb HDD. I wanted/needed a bigger one, now has a 120BG one as well.

Is that your answer, or the original poster's?

Rob.

ok what i mean is my new pc i got a few months ago has a pentuim 3 and that has a 5.6gb hd and that wasnt booting up so i took the one that was in my old pc which is a 1.6gb and tried it in my pen 3 pc and it still wouldnt boot up