OS not found

A friend has just been in touch with me regarding his PC. He says, "operating system not found"... and a big black screen, is what his laptop says to him when he tries to turn it on. He's been shutting it down a restarting it, but it apppears to be completely random on the number of times he has to do this before it actually turns itself on.

Any ideas guys?

 

where are the details m8?

installed os? exact words on the screen? programs installed just before this started happening? Is it a multi-os system? Any hardware specs?

 

if you cannot enter DOS, the only thing left to do is to take the original windows cdrom and boot from there.

> Press any key to boot from CD > choose Repair
> in "Dos" type: chkdsk /f /r (watch the space between the "/" and the "f"
let it search for errors and fix
> then type: fixmbr and choose Y(es)
> then type: fixboot and choose Y(es)

then you will have to copy some files from your original cdrom, you can find all the info here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626/en-us

good luck

Inf.