Hi, Feel like s--- this morning when ive arrived at work and found this message on one of our servers. 'operating system not found'. Could someone please explain as to why this could happen and would it be able to retrieve any data from the disk? also, when i do a scsi scan, you can hear it work...

Have you got a RAID controller built-in to the system or is it just standard SCSI drives on a SCSI controller? If it's a hardware RAID can you get into the RAID Firmware and check the drive statuses? If not, can you interrupt the SCSI and get into the SCSI firmware and see all the devides that should be there? was there a power failure during the night? It sounds like it could be a drive failure. Can you boot off a floppy? If so, can you search for and download the freebie NTFSDos.exe and stick it on a DOS boot floppy. If the system will boot from the floppy ok you should be able to see NTFS partitions(read-only) as well as FAT16 ones.

Why did it happen? Same reason your car breaks down. It's a law of physics - everything goes from complex to simple. What to do? Well it depends if you get the same results after a reboot of the hardware. What's next? Depends on how prepared you are. Do you have a recent ERD? Do you have the NT cdrom handy? Did you document or know the hardware/drive configuration of this server? Is this a drive failure or the result of a virus? Does the scsi bios see the drive? If you boot up on a boot disk containing fdisk, does fdisk see the drive? Let's just hope its the boot sector got messed up only. There are two options with NT. You can go thru mounting the ntcd and starting install. Abort the install after the first boot. This will rewrite the boot sector. You will have to delete the install temp files and remove the upgrade entry in the boot.ini. Or you can go into install and choose repair. It will ask for the ERD. If you have it great if not no big deal since the only thing you are checking is boot files. This should get you booting if the drive isn't bad. You should be able to put this drive in another scsi based system if all you want to do is read off the data.

another possibility is that a floppy disk or cd-rom is being run instead of the hard disk. its unlikely, but it could happen!

I had this same thing happen on a laptop. I turned it on one day and it came up with "missing operating system". I had to boot with a floppy and re-format and re-install the operating system. There was no explanation as to why it happened but it hasn't happened since. I thought maybe it had to do with a crappy hard drive or some kind of shock to the drive but it was't mishandled. Hope you get it back working real soon! http://www.kf8zr.com