Laptop won't start up at all - BootDevice Not Found.

[Medgirl92]

Hello - My laptop took a bit of a fall about a week ago - but grabbed it by the screen before it fell directly on the floor (near miss). Now yesterday, when the mouse pad on the laptop froze up, I drummed on it a bit to get it working and the laptop suddenly shut off and this message appears when trying to start up: BootDevice Not Found. Please install an operating system on your hard disk.
I am not sure if it is relevant to the physical damage or if it is software related?
Any advice or instruction would be greatly appreciated!
Regards

 

[popeye]

Welcome Medgirl92! The drop and grab probably trashed some boot data on the hard drive at the very least. The drive heads could have crashed against the platters resulting in entire sectors being corrupted. Obviously not good.

My honest opinion would be to get another drive for the laptop and start from scratch. Then try to recover whatever you can from the drive that took the partial fall. Maybe someone else will have a different course of action. Good luck.

No recent disk image?

 

[frozwire]

First thing to do would be to check your hard drive if it is still detected in your laptop's BIOS. Or you can try to use Seatools for DOS via a bootable disk (USB/CD/DVD).