Missing Operating System

[Corigami]

Well I noticed hammer was skipping quite a bit and decided I should restart my computer. My computer froze at "saving your settings..." for quite a while, and eventually shut down. When it rebooted, it went past the bios and right to a "Missing operating system" error. Damn it, I guess my hard drive is hosed. So I take my hard drive out, freeze it for a few hours in a ziplock bag and plug it back in hoping to get a few minutes to grab some files. Instead, the computer won't even boot to bios. It just revs all the fans on and off and blinks between d5 and 00 on the seven segment display. I remove all ram but one stick and take my graphics card out. Still no luck. Anyone have an idea what is going on? I am calling xfx tomorrow but I'm not expecting any help from them.

System:
XFX 750a mobo
AMD 9500 phenom quad
OCZ 3gb 1066mhz ddr2
GTX 260 core 216 superclocked

[vcool]

well...why did you put it in the freezer?

[stoopdapoop]

well...why did you put it in the freezer?

[joe_dirt976]

something about overheating i think

[ErikKiller]

Sorry but,

well...why did you put it in the freezer?

[srredfire]

Putting a hard drive in the freezer can help restore data, and essentially buy you time for recovering files. Yes, it sounds weird, but it can work. I've seen it work first hand. Of course it's not a permanent solution, but it can give you that extra hour or so to get off important things you really need.

[vcool]

Well I was expecting something like that, but I was just wondering because the HDD obviously worked before but with errors, but after the freezer it just broke. Basically I was saying "the answer to your problem is in your post, there's nothing we can do..."

It's silly to take such drastic measures as potentially fucking up your drive before trying anything else.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

I know you can sometimes give new life to broken vid cars by quite literally baking them in the oven, but as I've said - it's not so much the fact that Corigami put it in the freezer that amazed me, but that Cor did it first. (at least that's what I understood from his post.)

Anyway, now that I think about it, it is strange after all since if the HDD is borked then he should be getting the same error, but he doesn't. On the other hand, if the HDD is the only thing you've touched before and after, it seems to be the most likely cause.

[Corigami]

My motherboard should be going in to bios whether the hard drive is working, gone bad, or unplugged. Now, with one stick of RAM and with or without the hard drive plugged in it does not make it to BIOS. If I was still getting the same error, I'd just know that the hard drive has gone completely bad.

[zombie@computer]

strip all cards and peripherals, do a hard bios reset and try to boot. then one by one add peripherals (hdd last!) to see when and if it boots.

[Corigami]

It wasn't booting because of dust bunnies in the ram slots. The hard drive is working again for now as well. I guess I'll back up what I can and pray for the best.

[nub]

Um yeah...keep your system nice and clean. Dust can do some mean shit to your components.


PS: I lol'd at the "baking your video card" fix.