As a general note

[annathepiper]

The words "Operating system not found" are some damned scary words to see on your computer screen when you haven't been diligent at all about making backups.

Here therefore are public thanks to the Gods of Computing that I was in fact able to get back into my hard drive and get years' worth of my personal data copied onto one of spazzkat's systems, because I would have been pretty damned upset if I had lost my writing. The roleplay logs I could live without, but my writing would be much more difficult to replace.

We'll be burning that data off the other system to CD tomorrow.

Comments

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

Try restarting it, then resetting it while it's on. The message you got is usually what you'll see if your CMOS battery has died- it's not automatically indicative of a system problem.

Re:

[annathepiper]

Nah, this is obviously a hard drive problem. The thing is making scary noises when I boot it up -- and from what we have observed about its behavior, my spouse thinks it's probably losing a bearing that's causing it to spin slower than the necessary speed, so the computer can't find it.

Thanks for the suggestion though. :) I have observed that if I turn it on and the thing can't find the hard drive initially, if I kick over into BIOS and let it sit for a bit it suddenly magically finds the drive. I don't know if this means it had to warm up or what.

But I'm going to be looking at prices on new hard drives for this species of Compaq laptop.