upon starting my computer it informs me of a missing operating system, my system is a dell xps, I have no system image disks. I have purchased a recovery usb from dell, now that does not work. I have also tried a system repair disk and that lists no operating system. I have no idea of what drivers to load and from where.
I suspect that you have somehow lost Windows boot manager or ruined MBR.
My advice is this: Do not try to load drivers; it's pointless. A very simple way of restoring your machine to life, assuming that it is not a hardware problem and that you have not deleted the system by accident, is as follows: a) using GParted, check the layout of your hard drive, to make sure that you have an empty space available on any of the drives (sda, sdb, etc.). Incidentally, using the same GParted you can see if your Windows files are still present.
b) Using a friend's computer, download and burn a disk with ANY current Linux distribution - Ubuntu, or LinuxMint, for example. Install it, using the "do something else" option at the partitoning stage - choose an empty space on any available disk, and allow the bootloader to be installed to the default device.
Follow prompts and allow installation to proceed. Once it is complete, restart the computer; you should see a boot menu with choices of OS's. Windows should be one of them. Choose the Windows entry to log into - this should bring you to your familiar Windows screen. Again, the assumption is that your Win OS is not damaged and only the boot manager is missing. If you are comfortable with having Windows and Linux side by side on your machine, that's all you need to do.
Otherwise,
If Windows starts, you can rebuild boot and MBR using the system repair disk command line
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
Reboot the machine.
When you rebuild Windows MBR, you will no longer have access to Linux.
