So my girlfriend ran into a strange problem with her PC. Its something Im sure I could tinker my way thru but the only problem is that she (and her PC) is 800 miles away. I was hoping someone may have a good idea as to what the actual problem is, because I dont want her inside her PC for any longer than necessary. The Problem: She said she was in the room and it was running perfectly fine (had been booted for 1.5 days). She left the room for a few minutes to do something, came back and it was on a DOS screen displaying the message "non-system disk in drive A:/ Please insert a bootable blahblahblah". There is (was) no floppy in the drive and a restart simply brings her back to the same screen. None of her roommates were in the house at the time and the PC had suffered no recent shock or software changes. My thoughts: I recommended she change the boot sequence to boot from primary HDD first and nothing. I asked her to try to insert her OS CD and try to repair... but it gave the message "Windows XP was unable to locate a mass storage device on this computer". So somethings up with her HDD? I know very little about her specs... athlon 1800, 40GB HDD... its a Dell. Does anyone have any clue as to what exactly couldve gone wrong here? Thanks in advance fellas.
Sounds like Hard Drive problems... I'd check that all the cables are seated properly - one may have worked loose. A couple of ideas... Have a look in the Bios - see if the HD is recognized in there & make sure boot sequence is set up correctly. Boot from a floppy, and see if you can access the HD from there.
