One of the most unpleasant and shocking messages for users at the start of the operating system is the appearance on the black screen of the line Missing operating system. Not everyone knows what to do with c 'nbv, because, it would seem, yesterday the computer or laptop worked quite normally, and nothing of the kind was noticed. But do not despair. Of course, the problem can be quite serious, especially regarding the physical damage of the hard drive, but in many cases, if the failure is not related to the hard drive, it can be eliminated using several simple methods.
Download: Missing operation system. What does this error mean?
To begin with, a few words about what this failure is all about. As you know, on the computer’s hard drive there is, firstly, a special system partition in which the operating system itself is installed, and secondly, boot sections and entries that are responsible for starting the OS.
So what to do with the Missing operating system? Let's just translate this line. Based on the literal version of the translation, this means a lost operating system. In other words, the computer accesses boot records, directly to the bootloader and the system partition, but does not find the installed OS. Why?
Where did the system go? Missing operating system: reasons for the failure
Indeed, where could the operating system go if the user did not reinstall it, did not delete the system files and did not perform any actions that, in his opinion, could affect the performance of the OS? Unfortunately, in most cases this opinion is erroneous. The fact is that the system itself is not insured against failures that are not dependent on the user.
But, suppose the user saw the line Missing operating system on the computer screen at startup. What to do with the error will be clear after finding out the reasons for its occurrence. And among them, the following can be distinguished as the main ones:
- incorrect boot priority settings in the BIOS ;
- Incorrect parameters of the initialization mode and HDD operation;
- hard drive errors;
- damage to the bootloader and boot sectors;
- hard drive wear;
- exposure to viruses.
Troubleshooting BIOS Settings
One of the most common problems is the incorrectly set download priority, and so many users just forget about it. Perhaps the last time the user simply played the game using removable media (for example, DVD), maybe the BIOS settings "flew" by themselves, who knows ...
But back to the Missing operating system error. What to do in the simplest case? You must use a key or key combination at startup and enter the primary I / O system called the BIOS.
Here you need to find the boot section (usually called Boot, Boot Sequence, Boot Priority or something like that) and look at the order of the devices from which the operating system is started. Suppose the first one in the list is a DVD-ROM (optical drive), the second is a removable USB device, and only the third in line is the HDD (Hard Drive).
Suppose, at the moment, there is no optical disk in the drive (or not a system disk, for example, with a game inserted) or a USB flash drive is inserted into the USB port, again, not with a boot distribution, but with ordinary files. So it turns out that on these media there are neither boot records, nor the boot loader, nor even the operating system, which ultimately leads to the appearance of the line Missing operating system. What to do in such a situation? There can be two options: either remove all removable media and restart, or install the first HDD device (in the BIOS, the 1-st Boot Device line usually uses the PgUp / PgDown keys, but sometimes other combinations may be present to move the HDD line from lower to higher location). After saving the settings by pressing the F10 key (Save & Exit) and confirming the saving of the parameters (Y or OK), it will remain to reboot. If the problem was precisely that, it would disappear.
In extreme cases, in SATA modes for HDD, you can set the IDE parameter instead of AHCI, which sometimes allows you to fix the problem.
Hard drive issues
Things get worse when the root cause is the hard drive itself. It is possible that in this case, the line may appear Missing operating system. What to do? Again, there may be several options, depending on what the nature of the problem is.
Let's start with the worst - a situation when the hard drive became unusable or, as it is called, began to crumble. It is usually impossible to fix the problem, however, as a last resort, you can try to resuscitate the hard disk using the HDD Regenerator utility, which is said to be able to remagnetize the hard drive.
Using the Shell
But if the hard drive is “alive”, you can first check it for errors, and then restore the bootloader or even completely overwrite the boot sector.
To do this, boot from any installation or recovery circuit media, install it in the BIOS parameters as the first device, and call up the command line (usually this is Shift + F10 for quick access or one of the GUI menu sections).
First, the hard drive is checked for errors with automatic correction. To do this, enter the command chkdsk c: / x / f / r, and then enter the bootloader recovery lines bootrec.exe / fix mbr and bootrec.exe / fixboot.
After that, you can try to boot the system by first removing the removable media.
If this does not help, the boot sector is completely rewritten, only this time in the command console (again, when booting from removable media) the line bootrec.exe / rebuildbcd is written. But this option almost always helps.
Additional Actions
In principle, the most basic solutions that allow reanimating the loading of the operating system if the problems are not related to physical damage to the hard drive were considered above. However, the matter may not be limited to this alone. The fact is that some viruses are also capable of causing the appearance of such situations.
In this case, it is strongly recommended to check the entire computer system for threats using tools such as Kaspersky Rescue Disk or a similar development from Dr. Web They need to be written to removable media and used as the first boot device (they have their own boot records). Such utilities, by the way, are able to detect even those deeply hidden viruses that ordinary regular scanners or security tools in a running system skip.