"no operating system found" bad BIOS battery?

hard drive going bad?

cheers ...

it doesn't really matter if the bios battery goes bad all that really does i think is just to keep time and bios adjustments the user makes other then that i don't think youneed a battery. most likey its the hd like qhn said.

Disconnect the external unit and see if the problem persists.

How is the external HDD attached (USB or IEEE1394/ilink/firewire?). Sometimes - especially with older firewire enclosures, the chipsets and not matched very well to the PC and the end result is a "Hung" machine at bootup - it just sits there trying to become unconfused. This also can happed with USB depending on the enclosure and if you are using a Hub.

Well it appears as if you have elimianated the external driver from the equation - so it's not the problem.

Go to the Web Site of the HDD Manufacturer and download their diagnostics routine. Normally, you can find in easier in the HDD RMA section. Installing the software will normally mean creating either a floppy or a CD boot disc and then running that software from one of various flavors of DOS. This is the only way of really determining if the HDD is bad or marginal. Most of the diagnostic routines are very very good at spotting bad hardware.

Another thing that you might do is once the unit is up and running, try to run a SCANDISK on it to see if there are any errors.

If there are no errors reported, that is in and of itself not a guarentee that the drive is not failing; however, will give you an indication of any gross errors.

Hard to say from my vantage point if the problem is a bad CMOS battery as you alluded to (most likely not: however, the machine is a couple of years old and I would not fully discount that as a problem).

A bad HDD is a probability - run the diagnostics. Another thing that may come into play is bad memory - get a hold of MEMTEST86 and give it a go. Memory problems can cause such errors; however, I think it may not be likely in this case - run it anyway just for Grins and Giggles.

Like G said its possible. I'd run the hard drive test..if your hard drive is good it could be the battery. I had a battery go out on me and every time i'd have to change bios settings for it to boot into windows. (Bios kept changing the boot order and not saving the boot from hard drive option.) It also didn't keep time. So if you go into bios and it has the wrong time..thats a good indication you have a bad battery..

Most modern drives have S.M.A.R.T. - Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, which records critical HD operating data.

The parameters recorded by SMART can be read with a viewer - there's a simple free one here:

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

There are many more utilities that can analyse the SMART data and also show a map of the disk surface, highlighting any errors or damaged sectors.

Carrottop......

YOUR HARD DRIVE IS GOING TO FAIL... SOOOOON. i know u want to ask around and find another reason, but my friend and i have had this happen. the toshiba hard drive is failing and each time you restart it's slowly deteriorating the harddrive. luckily i backed up in time, but my friend lost everything.

PLEASE BACK UP QUICK IF YOU CAN. i had all the same symptoms... you'll keep booting and slowly you'll start to hear weird high pitched sounds coming from the hd (front right side where your right palm is) and it will get worse til the system stutters, if you're lucky enough to have the bios load the hard drive.

I actually took some videos as it got worse. It's your lucky day, these were after the "Operating System not found" messages and "lucky boot-ups"....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RZwBVTtZQY
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_QwOovMt8I
hard drive symphony

Once again, it is the HARD DRIVE ABOUT TO BREAK!!!!!
just a notebookforum lurker and fellow 5690 owner. have fun ordering another hd. I just ordered a Seagate 40 gig replacement.

-LIFESAVING

If you've got data you want/need, try throwing the notebook's drive in that external case you have and getting your data out.

I've had this problem before on my Sony; it has a connector problem between the mobo & HD occasionally. However, since your unit hasn't been moved, that pretty much says that your HD is going South.