Computer failing to load Windows

[Mart]

Hi Guys,
A friend of mine is having problems with his laptop, some time ago he installed windows Vista and never had any problems until a few weeks/months down the line when it suddenly failed to load windows at all. It gets just past the Bios screen and comes up with 'OS not found' I've attempted to re-boot the computer altogether and place a new install of windows 7, but I'm having the same problem. I've tested the hard drive on another computer and it works perfectly and loads to windows as it should.However as soon as I plug it back into his laptop it doesn't load, when viewing the drives in the bios there are explanation marks by the hard drive. I'm baffled and out of ideas of what it might be, and was hoping for a little help.

 

[IAntDemo]

I think this means that the harddrive caddy bay is damaged , with an exclamation mark sounds just like that it's the harddrive or the connection.. sounds strange but if it was the connection between one of the two I'm sure it tells you a fault on the motherboard..this is a strange one.. try a totally different harddrive, or put the harddrive inside another computer and run a chkdsk in command prompt type: chkdsk /r

 

[Mart]

I did actually suggest to him it could be a problem with the RAM and there not being enough to cope with the requirements of Vista and Windows 7, but your theory of the connection issue seems more the case as thinking about it if it was a Ram issue it wouldn't just suddenly stop working, or would it?. I'll give my friend the suggestion and see if that resolves anything.

 

[IAntDemo]

what's the machine specs?

Vista and 7 aren't all that different in requirements, i think vista uses 15gb and windows 7 16gb and that's the only difference in requirements.. unless it's home they use more space

How big is the HDD also..

 

[Mart]

I'm actually waiting for my friend to get back to me on the spec's of the laptop, but emailed him earlier and passed on your suggestion that it is quite possibly a connection problem.

Thank you for all your help

 

[IAntDemo]

No problem, alot of the times it would tell you an error if it's the connection, like media test failure, check cable...

But you said you've tried the harddrive in another system? I'm quite surprised it actually loaded up because normally putting a harddrive in another machine with OS already installed you'd get a blue screen, unless you put the harddrive in the same manufacture laptop; eg, a harddrive from a dell to another dell would work.. 99% of the time

 

[Mart]

Yeh the hard drive has been tested and runs fine in another system, not sure if both laptops were the same manufacturer tho as it was tested before my friend asked me for a little advice, I'm not an expert at laptops but know a little. Hence the reason I turned to this. Also one more question you may or may not know the answer to, I've got an old laptop upstairs that I can't log onto as i've forgot the administrator password, is there anyway of going into bios or windows registry to reset it, or is the only way past, a clean windows install?

 

[cboucher]

Try downloading UBCD4WIN (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows) and boot your system from it. It's basically a stripped down version of XP with a bunch of utilities preinstalled. Among those are a couple of password recovery tools. Google UBCD4WIN, you'll see...