Computer will not boot up

[NoodleTech]

My friend just bought an HP s3120n slimline PC with Windows Vista Home Premium a few months ago and it has been working great since then.

Just yesterday, in the middle of internet browsing, the PC began to lag very badly and restarted itself. Upon restarting itself, the PC would not boot up. He gets a message saying "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."

He has no floppy drive, so the system isn't trying to boot from there. When I took a look at the computer and tried to boot from the Windows XP disk, I see that his entire hard drive is unpartitioned space. WTF? Did his OS become corrupt?

I ran a scan of his 320GB Samsung hard drive with the Samsung HUTIL hard drive diag. utility and it passed all tests. I am about to reinstall Windows Vista. I feel like this problem will take more than an OS reinstall to fix... I don't want his OS corrupting in the future and have him lose all his data again. Any idea what may have caused this and how to fix it? Thanks

 

[c0re]

My friend just bought an HP s3120n slimline PC with Windows Vista Home Premium a few months ago and it has been working great since then.

Just yesterday, in the middle of internet browsing, the PC began to lag very badly and restarted itself. Upon restarting itself, the PC would not boot up. He gets a message saying "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."

He has no floppy drive, so the system isn't trying to boot from there. When I took a look at the computer and tried to boot from the Windows XP disk, I see that his entire hard drive is unpartitioned space. WTF? Did his OS become corrupt?

I ran a scan of his 320GB Samsung hard drive with the Samsung HUTIL hard drive diag. utility and it passed all tests. I am about to reinstall Windows Vista. I feel like this problem will take more than an OS reinstall to fix... I don't want his OS corrupting in the future and have him lose all his data again. Any idea what may have caused this and how to fix it? Thanks

Did you check the cmos settings and boot order to see if the drive is setup correctly there. Sounds like either the parttition or the boot sector got corrupted somehow. The drive lagging badly then rebooting may be a issue with the drive itself. I would contact Samsung and get it replaced before reinstalling an os.

 

[NoodleTech]

The CMOS settings are the factory HP settings. the hard drive is the first device to boot. I would think there is an issue with the hard drive as well, but shouldn't the HUTIL drive diagnostic utility detect it in the surface scan? I don't want to go through unnecessary trouble replacing the drive if nothing is wrong, plus my friend is being anal about me taking a long time to fix it right now.