[cmcelliot]

I have an inspiron 1501, and when opening it this morning, get message that stated "operating system not found." It worked yesterday, I have trend micro as virus protection, although not sure if that information is pertinent or not.
Can someone help me?

[Dan O]

Here's a link to a MS article that should help: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

Good luck.

[raybro]

This could very well indicate a bad hard drive, but there are some things you can try.

First, go into BIOS by tapping the F2 key at startup. Using the arrow keys select "Boot" now with the down arrow key highlight Hard Drives and hit enter. Does the internal hard drive how there? If it does, hit the Esc key and highlight boot order. Hit enter. Is the drive shown in the boot sequence? If so where is it in the boot order? If the drive does not appear in BIOS, its probably failed.

You try to run a Repair process on your XP Installation. This will reinstall all system files and leave your personal files, programs, drivers and such untouched. Its a pretty simple process assuming you have your original XP CD from Dell. Click here to go to an MS site for instructions on how to go about this. Click here for another site with the same instructions with pictorials of the process.

Last resort thing to do... On bootup repeatedly tap the F11 key and you will go into the Dell Restore partition on your hard drive. This partition contains a Symantec Ghost image of your Hard drive when the laptop was new. If you chose to run it, you will lose all records, files, photos, programs, etc you have created or installed since you got the computer. Since this process runs a format on the drive, you may not be able to recover any your files EVER.

The choice you make will no doubt be influenced by just how important the data on your hard drive is to you. If the drive has failed you are confronted with either losing the data or paying someone to recover the data from the drive. That is a process the average user simply doesn't have the capability of doing. As close as you can come to doing that would be to connect the hard drive to another computer and use something like Recuva to try and retrieve files. That may or may not be possible with a failed drive.

It can get quite complex, so I suggest you try the simple step of running a repair first and go from there.

Raybro