HDD problem

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MartynK

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I'm looking for some advice guys.

My wife's computer (Medion desktop running W7 32 bit) won't boot and gives the message "Unable to load operating system". I tried a few things unsuccessfully, and then booted into the BIOS. It shows the hard drive and optical drive in ( ) as "disabled" but there's no option to enable them again, so I obviously can't get access.

Can anyone offer suggestions?

Many thanks.
 
Probably a red herring, but is there another menu item in your bios for "boot order". There should be one somewhere. Perhaps it's been removed from the boot order entirely leaving it trying to boot from a drive that either doesn't exist or doesn't have an operating system on it.
Although it shows your HDD as disabled, does it show any information about it? There will probably be an option to detect the installed hard disk information which may re-enable it.

Finally (and it's unlikely), but if you're still using drives with IDE interfaces (A long rectangular connector with numerous pairs of pins), then one may be daisy-chained off the next. If the "master" drive has developed some kind of fault, it may be causing issues with the "slave" too, which might indicate why both cannot be seen by the PC. It's pretty old technology though now really - I expect both are SATA interfaces (little plugs that have an "L" shape if you look at the end of them).

Just hunches I'm afraid, but since it doesn't work anyway I guess it won't do any harm to check...
 
Have you tried tapping the F8 key on startup,access safe mode if possible run command prompt as admin and sfc /scannow may fix any errors or run a repair startup from the O/S disk.
 
possible options are you drives has died (electronically not mechanically), cable damaged or fallen out of drive/ motherboard, little powercell battery has gone flat on motherboard. Some has changed type of hdd in bios.

It is unusual for a drive fitted not to be seen by bios even if the drive is corrupted or unformatted.
 
If both drives are invisible and there's no sign of cables being detached then there's a good chance you have a Mobo fault. First, check all the internal cables are connected OK, remove any external drives and things in USB sockets except kbd & mouse, then see if the bios can autodetect the HDD.
 
Thanks everyone, appreciated. Quite a few things here to try, so I'll post an update tomorrow.
 
Can't believe it's more than a month since I posted this, but just wanted to thank everyone who gave advice. To be frank, I haven't got round to this yet. A few things - work related - went a bit mad and I had to move the PC down the 'To Do' list, but I'll try and get to it this weekend.
 
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