Operating System not found...

[Joshua]

When I start my laptop, with Windows XP Pro, every month
and a half it will give me the error that it could not
find an Operating System. Then I will reboot the machine
and it will give me this error several times. After awhile
it will start up correctly like nothing ever happend, then
crash 10 minutes later. Then, after a reboot it will boot
up correctly and be fine and peachy for another month and
a half or longer. This just seems odd. I don't hear any
clicking in my harddrive nor do I hear any strange noises.
Is there a solution to this? By the way, I have also done
a Win XP repair when this problem has occured, and it
fixed it temporarily.
THANKS!!
Joshua

[Jim]

Sounds like you might have bad boot sectors.

When the HD is booted, there's a number of sectors at the beginning of the
HD that are dedicated to holding the MBR (Master Boot Record). The MBR
contains code to boot the active partition indicated in the partition table
(also in the MBR). If theses sectors become corrupted or otherwise
unreadable, then either the active indicator on the MBR or even the
addressing in the partition table may be unreadable, and hence the system
reports no operating system. I suspect that in this case the active
partition indicator is unreadable at times. Given enough reboots, it
becomes readable on occasion and you boot just fine. The repair working
also makes sense since it probably rewrites the MBR, at least until its
corrupted again.

It's always possible a virus or even spyware or activation tools are mucking
w/ the boot sector and causing this problem. So I'd be sure to run your
anti-virus program, perhaps use Lavasoft Ad-aware 6.0 to remove any spyware,
and lastly watch out for third-party activation tools, like the kind
Intuit's TurboTax install (known to muck w/ the boot sector to hide some of
its activation info). I'd also run CHKDSK /F to see if it finds bad boot
sectors, it *may* be able to move the offending boot sector(s) eslewhere
(although, this may be problematic if the boot sector MUST reside on the
first 16 sectors, which is normally the case, a new HD *might* be your only
solution). But investigate these other possibilities first.

HTH

Jim


"Joshua" > wrote in message
...
> When I start my laptop, with Windows XP Pro, every month
> and a half it will give me the error that it could not
> find an Operating System. Then I will reboot the machine
> and it will give me this error several times. After awhile
> it will start up correctly like nothing ever happend, then
> crash 10 minutes later. Then, after a reboot it will boot
> up correctly and be fine and peachy for another month and
> a half or longer. This just seems odd. I don't hear any
> clicking in my harddrive nor do I hear any strange noises.
> Is there a solution to this? By the way, I have also done
> a Win XP repair when this problem has occured, and it
> fixed it temporarily.
> THANKS!!
> Joshua