I desperatly need help with a sony Vaio laptop. I am running Windows Me. When I start my computer I get a message saying operating system not found. however, i can go into the bios settings and restore my default settings. Once I do this I save and exit and my computer will load my operating system just as it needs to. Once I power off my computer, I restart it only to find the same message of no operating system found?? Also, I have run my system recovery disks provided by the manufacturer and the computer will start once but as soon as I power down and restart it the message appears again.

Sounds very much like your CMOS battery is dead - that would cause your machine to lose the hard drive settings when powered off

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Thanks. I will try the Cmos battery but the time on the clock and date are always exact. Could that be possible if the Cmos battery is dead? Also, this happened earlier this year and someone who is now unavailable fixed it in a matter of no time. Do you have any other ideas?

Sorry, I checked again, when I reset the defaults in my Bios, the hard drive is coonfigured for auto find, when I restart it, the hard drive is defined in the bios via, heads,cyls, etc. But it brings up None after for the primary IDE drive. Its a phoenix bios 4.0 release 6.0 if that helps.
Also, When it worked, on the startup it would say continuing to load windows set up files.
Now it does not do that even when I get it to start. It goes straight from the Sony logo to the Windows Me logo or goes straight from the Sony Logo to the Operating system not foundpage.

I also tried running the fdisk command with my startup disk and it said no fdisk found and I have tried running the system recovery again and it displayed the same message of no fdisk drives.

No, if the time & date are being maintained, then it's not likely the CMOS battery after all.

Perhaps the hard drive is not initializing quickly enough - some BIOS have a setting to disable any 'quick start' feature or else allow you to add a brief delay to the startup - see if that helps.

'no fdisk found' (?) Is that the actual message, and not 'no fixed disks present'??

That would be expected if the drive is not initializing at the startup, although it's possible that the drive is beginning to fail.

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I think your right. It said no fixed disks present. I can not find any quick start features or delay features in the bios either. I rebooted my computer again and it recognized my drive and I am now in fdisk. I have one hard drive but two partitions. do I set both active?

Only the primary partition (C:) needs to be active. If it works ok (when it does start up) then there isn't much you can or should be doing with fdisk, other than using it to check drive status (4).

If it used to start up normally, but recently developed this quirk, I would tend to suspect that the drive might be starting to fail - since it doesn't seem to be a battery issue.

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Now it seems to be loading fine but it takes a little longer than normal.
Thanks for all the help, I think it pretty much is working again. I dont need to go back and format the drive with the startup disk do I. It said I needed to after setting the active partition. But it already has the operating system on it.

Using fdisk to remove or recreate partitions, or formatting a drive erases it - I don't think that's what you want to do at this point. If you were booting from C:, then that drive was already active, so I doubt if that's an issue either.

If the drive is not seen by the BIOS, then you will receive the 'no fixed disks present' message from fdisk if you try to use it - neither it nor format will work under those conditions.

Might be prudent to backup any important info (this is always true) and test the drive for errors periodically.

Possibly some drive cables have loosened, but I would only check that out as a last resort, if the machine refuses to start - laptops are 'fun' to work on

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Thank YOu very much. THis has helped me a great deal. Computer is back up and running fine.

Ok - I don't think we really did anything, it seems like an intermittant problem, but I'm glad it's running alright.

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