Member Avatar for laila christin

it all started like this, the dvd drivers went missing/ the cpu message was is not installed. so he went into microsoft and downloaded 1. but when he tried to restart it it wouldnt start, we took harddrive test and it stopped in the middle, and trien to boot the cpu, but the boot section was missing.(as the same were his cd`s to the cpu) we tryed to fix it with the repair programs to, but the recovery part is gone.
i have tried every thing, but my conclution is that the laptop was killed by a macro.. is there something i can do with it?

pliz help us

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Thread summary: describes an HP Pavilion dv9500 that now shows "operating system not found" and whose recovery partition appears gone. Replies from , and have suggested reinstall/scan approaches. Before reinstalling or buying parts, run a few focused, non‑destructive checks to narrow whether this is a firmware/boot corruption, a loose/failing drive, or simple data-loss.

First checks (firmware level)

  • On power-up enter the BIOS/boot menu (watch the screen for the key prompt) and look for the hard drive model under Storage or Boot devices. If the drive is not listed, the firmware cannot see it — that points to a physical/connection problem. Power down, remove battery and AC, open the HDD bay and gently reseat the drive and connector, then recheck BIOS. If the drive still doesn’t appear, try the drive in a USB‑to‑SATA adapter on another PC to see if it is recognized.

If the drive is seen but Windows won’t boot

  • Do not write to the drive. Boot a Linux live USB (or a diagnostics USB) to inspect partitions and S.M.A.R.T. health (use fdisk -l, lsblk and smartctl -a /dev/sdX). If files are important, copy them off immediately to another disk (mount read‑only).

When the drive shows read errors

  • Clone the failing disk to an image before attempting repairs. Example ddrescue workflow (run on another machine with enough free space):
sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdX /media/backup/image.img /media/backup/ddrescue.log
sudo ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/sdX /media/backup/image.img /media/backup/ddrescue.log

Replace /dev/sdX and paths as appropriate; the destination must be a different physical disk.

When to replace or seek help

  • If BIOS never sees the drive or long diagnostics report many bad sectors, replace the drive. If data is critical or cloning fails, professional data recovery is safer. These steps refine whether the problem is physical (replace drive) or logical (data recovery and repair), and they avoid needless reinstallation attempts or destructive actions.

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Member Avatar for kaninelupus

The fact that something has scrubbed the recovery partition does not sound good at all :'( Unless you had a really old model running Win 2000, there is no reason what-so-ever you should have required a DVD driver, as XP and beyond are all plug-and-play where they are concerned... and considering this is Vista/Win7 boards, I'm assuming Vista??

The only sure-fire way to know if hard-drive has not taken a kill-all smack (without paying service fees of course) is to try installing a retail build of Windows, or a Linux build. Win7 RC1 still freely (legally) avail, and as HP drivers can be a lil bit of a pain for Linux (I'm sure someone will spark up at that, but anyhow), would be first recommendation. If even that can't install, I'd being taking in to get hardware looked over.

For that you could be looking in one of two directions. A cooked HDD, or a firmware-embedded rootkit (and they're a right MF to get rid of).

Member Avatar for designbooks

try scanning with norton internet security 2009 and if that doesent work there is AVG, Avira and Avast all free and sometimes removes viruses norton detects and wont delete.

Member Avatar for kewlman

so right now does the computer boot at all?

Member Avatar for laila christin

so right now does the computer boot at all?

no it will not boot or open windows . only get message" operating system not found"

Member Avatar for kaninelupus

OK - as I suggested, try a FULL alternate OS install (by FULL, I mean not the recovery disk which relies on that recovery partition being there). Either the Win7 RC or a Linux disk (not a live disk, as you want to see if the HDD is actually capable of functioning with an OS install of any description)... try installing and see if the HDD is capable of re-running. Otherwise, may be in need of a hard-drive replacement.

Member Avatar for kewlman

i agree with kaninelupus, you need to determine if the hard drive is capable of being used now.. you need to re install an operating system, do a FULL format to see if it even goes through.. if it doesn't work a new hard drive is needed..
unfortunetly either way whatever you had on that harddrive is going to be lost. i know people's laptops i have worked on in the past had thousands of pictures (family pictures) which they lost because no backups were made.

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