Legit Reviews

Mom dropped her HP 502N off, she said it wouldnt boot. When I turn it on the HP splash screen comes up then goes blank and a message appears. It says "Operating System Not Found".
No matter what I've tried it will not boot. I went into the BIOS and checked for the HDD or any drives and none are listed!
I tried to get the BIOS to recognize any drive and it will not. This includes the CD-Rom, DVD-RW and the HDD!
Does anyone have any ideas what the problem may be?
The only thing that comes to mind for me is the IDE controller has failed, could this be?

Could be the hard drive failed, the cable failed, the power cord failed, the power cord fell out, the cable fell out, onboard controller failed, BIOS became corrupted, etc.

Clear the CMOS - probably a jumper on the board - IF it has it. I know some of the brand name companies never put the jumper on the boards, the bastards.

If that doesnt help remove all cables from EVERYTHING - power, ide, sata, etc. Plug in the power for the motherboard and for JUST the hard drive. Plug in the ide for JUST the hard drive - boot up, if you cant see anything then unplug the power and cable from the HD and try it for the cd or dvd drive - if you still cant see anything try it for the other one....if still nothing, will it boot from a usb drive? You could try restoring the BIOS from the website, but you would have to have a way to boot into it.

Well anyway - if none of that works I say the MB took a dump Also check the caps on the motherboard to see if they are bulging or have a blackish material coming out of the tops of them - bad caps were going around for YEARS - I just had a computer 2 days ago that had this probelm - only solution is to replace the MB or try and desolder and solder new caps on the board ( TOTAL waste of time for a $50-$100 board )

Mike

Let me know if you need more help.

The first thing I did was disconnect everything and reconnect. No Help!
On your suggestion I tried one drive at a time. No Help!
I tried to boot into Spinrite using both the CD rom and the DVD rw, it did not boot from the CD either time. Yes I changed the boot sequence in the BIOS before I tried.
I looked the board over once and do not see a jumper

I'm going to give it one more chance..... I hate HP's

I tried to boot from a WinXP CD .....Nothing!
I booted into a Win98 floppy and tried to run fdisk and it did not detect a drive!

KnightRid wrote:Could be the hard drive failed, the cable failed, the power cord failed, the power cord fell out, the cable fell out, onboard controller failed, BIOS became corrupted, etc.

Clear the CMOS - probably a jumper on the board - IF it has it. I know some of the brand name companies never put the jumper on the boards, the bastards.

I've never used a jumper to reset it, I just take out the little CR2025 battery and leave it out for a few seconds to reset it. It's a round, disc shaped battery on the mobo. Worth a shot, eh?

Try the battery removal bios reset, if that doesn't do it I'd heavily suspect a bad ide controller. Might be able to get by with a PCI ide controller, but when stuff starts going bad on a board it's usually not long before the whole board goes.

Methious wrote:Try the battery removal bios reset, if that doesn't do it I'd heavily suspect a bad ide controller. Might be able to get by with a PCI ide controller, but when stuff starts going bad on a board it's usually not long before the whole board goes.

I already pulled the battery for a few minutes and set everything back to default......No Luck
I'm betting on the IDE controller also, the HDD is on the primary and the CD and DVD are on the secondary and neither are being recognized.
I've pretty much given up on it.
Time to build a budget machine!