Thetownend.com

My personal laptop has stopped working. Everytime I turn it on, it doesn't boot and instead shows a message saying

Boot Device Not Found

Please Install an operating system on your hard disk

F2 System Diagnostics.

Any ideas on how to rectify this issue?

Do you have to reset the BIOS setting?

I think I tried this and it didn't work.

Randomly after the 5th time of turning and back on again its now 'Attempting Repairs'. God knows if the bloody thing is actually doing anything. No idea how long I should leave it for.

It can take up to an hour to do its checks, the longer it takes the more likelihood that its a physical disk error.

You can try and fix the MBR (boot files) and check for physical errors (bad sectors) in disk check, if one of those errors is in the boot record then the OS will need to be re installed (if its not a major disk failure).

If the "attempting repairs" works then it could just have been an erroneous file and you could be ok, usually this is far more severe in my experience and often means an impending disk failure if not an actual one already.

Cheers PV, I knew that you would know being the computer whizz that you are :)

I got bored and tried another 'hard reset' and it seems to be working now, hopefully I'm all set for Ifollow tomorrow now!

100% the drive has failed.

Or isn't plugged in. Had that myself before.

If you have got it going then take an "image"  of the drive with the likes of Acronis True Image software before the drive completely fails.

Download from Acronis.com and use a pen drive or external hard drive to take a backup or image of your drive and when it fails you can change the drive and then restore from your image from your backup device and everything is back to normal...

As Peter says normally boot sector damage which can be fixed but it normally means the drive is in its way out.

I would also now go to explorer.. click on c drive, right mouse click... tools ....run disk defragmenter which moves data from bad sectors if it can and marks them bad so the pc does not reuse the poor sectors.

**** Please bear in mind that disk defragmenter can take hours and hours to complete... I normally run this overnight

I love reading posts that make absolutely no sense to me. I’m at the stage now where my dad was when he got his first VCR and when we all marvelled at that  block and ball, back and forth video game you could play on your telly.

In the great scheme of things I am not that much younger than you I turn 55 in a few weeks, I too marvelled when we first got a VCR we would never miss another programme on TV again on one of our 3 amazing TV channels!

Weird that I have worked my entire adult career in computers so its 2nd nature to me and I love it but because you being that little bit older have not worked with them then its all like gobbledegook I expect.

Pension options soon JJ😁

Feels like I am already getting them not being allowed out during lockdown!