hey i have a HP Pavilion 7935 and i cant seem to get it to boot properley...first of all i was using it left the computer for a bit and came back and the system had restarted and posted the message "Operating System Not Found" so i rebooted and still got the same message...i checked all connections and same thing...so i said o well and reinstalled windows XP home and it worked good after that...i left it on last night and woke up this morning and the message had appeared again. so i went into the bios and made sure everything was recogized and such and checked all my jumper settings and it shows in the bios there is a HD but it doesnt say maxtor it just has a bunch of letters and numbers and jobberish and such....yet all my jumpers and cables are plugged in fine..now when i bootup it just stays on the HP logo screen and locks up(power button doesnt even work) and i have no idea what to do...i really need this computer for an event tommrow so any insight would be greatly appreciated THNX Duggy
Wow - I am sorry to say that sounds really really bad. My first inclination is to say the HD is going bad - its the mostly likely cause, however the jumble in your BIOS setup points to something different. That is to say, on your HD is a ROM(flash) with the HD information including PNP configuration data. During POST, the BIOS reads this data and then uses that to display a PNP OEM String. The fact the the string is corrupt would lead me to expect other important PNP data is corrupt as well. If the PNP configuration data is corrupt, then it is lucky if the devices operates at all (maybe unlucky if the drive geomotry is incorrect data could be inadvertantly destroyed). So its posssible the ROM on the device has gone bad (but kinda unlikely). I would think though that a pin might be loose/bent on either header (the MoBo or the drive) or the cable could have an internal/intermittant short or break. The obvious first thing to do is try a new cable and inspect the pins. If neither of these help, try the other controller(header) then try a different MoBo (to see if the PNP OEM String comes properly in the BIOS setup). After that - well, its time for a new HD whatever is causing it.
Some Maxtor drives did have problems with firmware corruption, so it's probable that this is the case It's worth checking all connections as mentioned above and also to try a different computer, but if these fail, it's likely the ROM on the drive is corrupted. The only ways to recover this data are replacement of the controller board (dodgy, because new drives store geometry info, defect tables and other drive-specific information in their memory), or take it to a data recovery specialist (which costs $$$). Hard disk failures are often the worst, and I can only hope that you have backups of important data
