I have a Compaq Presario laptop (1200 XL106) that has been running dual boot XP/Redhat. I had decided to remove any reminents of WinDow$ on it and reinstall Linux to run soley on the machine. I fdisked all partitions to start from scratch at which time I must have killed the MBR. Now when I boot up I get 'Operating System not found'. I have checked all cables and made sure that the BIOS sees both the HD and CD ROM however it will not boot from any bootable CD ROM I have. It will boot from floppies but I do not have any floppies that will allow me to boot from a floppy then initiate any Redhat or Mandrake install CD's. I have searched everywhere and cannot find a solution other than my drive being bad or a cable. I can assure you that they are fine as I can fdisk it from small linux boot and root floppies. Can anyone suggest how I can get a floppy that will allow me to start the Install process on either MDK or RH?


Thanks!!!

do you have the cdrom set as the first boot in your BIOS?
if not then this is the logical explanation on why you get this error...also you can always go download a bootdisk and start the installation that way if you'd like, but i would say you don't have the cdrom as your first boot device.
p.s. your drive is not bad nor is your cable.

I have the CD ROM as my first boot device as well as the HD set to Auto. The CD ROM has always booted before. The problem with finding me finding a floppy I have not found any other than ones that are .exe's in which I need window$ to execute and I don't have any windows boxes. I even tried to make a boot disk from my existing linux boxes (dd if=kernel of=/dev/fd0) however it will not work properly on my laptop. Upon bootup it gives me the correct memory, CPU, and drive specs however it simply will not boot off of the CD's (Which boot on all 3 of my other boxes)


Do you know of where I can get a boot disk that will allow me to initilize the CD ROM to start the install process? bootdisk.com seems to have primarily windows disks .exe and very limited linux disks with no cd rom support.

well is it possible for you to go to another box and pop in the cd and then navigate to the cd and go to the images folder and then make a bootdisk with the bootdisk.img file?

Well that was the easiest answer I never even thought of. I used a couple of images from the CD's using dd to put them on a floppy and blam... it would boot however something is definately wrong with the CD ROM... it will recognize it and show the correct Toshiba model # but can't access it. I have a usb cdrom so Imma try to get an image to recognize that.

Wish me luck