hp laptop says missing operating system

[stormysch]

when i turned on my laptop it said missing operating system took it in tech says might have been a virus if i do not care abut retrieving data i need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows how do i do this.

 

[alphanumeric]

Was windows preinstalled on that laptop?
If yes did you burn a set of recovery disks?
Does the hard drive show up correctly in the BIOS?
Is the BIOS set to boot from that drive?

 

[Kaktussoft]

when i turned on my laptop it said missing operating system took it in tech says might have been a virus if i do not care abut retrieving data i need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows how do i do this.

It could be a virus but no prove yet. Do you have a win7 install dvd? Or or system repair disc?

"missing operating system" text is in MBR... a small piece of code which runs just after pc starts. It's sector 0 on physical disk. "missing operating system" means.... it can't find an ACTIVE partition. Maybe partition is not active anymore. Maybe partitions got corrupted. Maybe MBR got corrupted.

All can be fixed. But you need one of the dvd's I asked you.

 

[Kaktussoft]

when i turned on my laptop it said missing operating system took it in tech says might have been a virus if i do not care abut retrieving data i need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows how do i do this.

Are you typing on a win7 machine now?

 

[Faladu]

Not much of a tech if all he said was that!

I yank that HD out and plug it onto my SATA/EIDE to USB adapter to another system to get the real lowdown.

$20 at most for such a rig and highly recommended, if the HD is intact/with data, easy to backup with this, also.