I've been having this problem for a while now, everytime I go to install windows xp, windows 7 (beta), Backtrack 3 beta / final, any OS really, and I go to boot from my hard drive, I get the old 'operating system not found' message; and after booting into my Backtrack live cd, it picks up my hard drive just fine and I can write / read from it. I've tried a few times manually installing Backtrack, using the command promp to create everything needed as well as partitioning, and configured lilo, etc, but I just cant get it to boot from the hard drive.

I went to google first off and searched aimlessly for a while until I hit This page; and I think, (I'm not really sure what it could be anymore) that my MBR might be bad? which I don't think would be the problem in retrospect because it's a fresh version of windows 7 beta i just installed at my friends house and worked just fine.

I'm running an Emachine T2245, here's my spec's:

Manufacturer: eMachines, Inc.
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz
Memory: 1.25GB
Hard Drive: 80 GB
Video Card: Intel(R) 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller

My BIOS is what came with it, so it should be the basic build.
(Maybe my motherboard or BIOS are screwy?)

Thanks for the help,

Tech

May be this won't hep you a lot but I was wondering : why do you need to install Backtrack ? If you want to use it for penetration testing, which is it's main purpose, why not start it from the CD-rom ?

I'm not trying to install backtrack, the problem is whether it be windows xp, linux, whatever, it wont boot off the hard drive. I'd like to have an operating system again and have my backtrack cd as a secondary option if I decide to use it, not have to rely on it for everything like I am now. I may as well not even have a hard drive in my computer because I cant even really use it for anything other than storage.

Did you use a live-cd to check hard disk integrity and re-format it at low level ?

I didn't really even give that a thought, I've only had a low level done once for one of my old hard drives, never done it personally; But, the hard drive is brand new, so the disk should be just fine.
Would I need to download a program to a disk?
Should I just go ahead and do it anyway just to be safe?

-edit-
also, I dont think it's a hard drive problem, I think it's something to do with my system, because I've tried at least 5 - 6 different hard drives in it and I've gotten the same result from every one of them.

Then sorry I run out of ideas. But if you think that's a BIOS or hardware problem may be you will get better answers in posting here ?

Check that you have one (and only one) partition marked as active/bootable. There are some retarded BIOSs that presume Windoze is already (pre-)loaded.

Also, what bootloader are you using? What order were the OS's installed in?

Often times, if you install Windows AFTER you've installed Linux, the linux will no longer boot or you may get some wierd errors.

If you installed Windows 7 last (which I presume), there's a possibility that the Windows bootloader has overwritten your previous bootloader in your MBR.

I'm not saying any of this "for fact" due to the face I'm still a linux newbie myself. If anyone else has any ideas, let me know as well. But from my experience, this was a common issue.

Have you checked the "boot device priority" in your BIOS? Perhaps your BIOS hasn't put your hard drive there.

When I tried to use cfdisk through the cmd on BT3, it gives me 'FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition begins after end-of-disk'

... I've never gotten that message before..

What do I do to fix this?

Boot device list is HDD, CDrom, removable devices, network.
no matter which way i go with it, I never get a 'press any key to boot form cd' message, it just boots from the cd, or gives me the OS not found message.

Only one OS installed at the moment, but with linux I was using lilo as my bootloader. the windows 7 bootloader is what I want to be using.
Although, even if I were still using the lilo bootloader, I probably wouldnt be able to get it working because it always gave me some error about my hdd. but eh, dont care much cause I can just use the live disk.

Put the CD first in your BIOS boot order.
As for that error from cfdisk, let's see the output from "fdisk -l" (might need root/sudo).

Sorry, double post.

Here's what I got for ye:

fdisk -l /dev/hdd1

Disk /dev/hdd1: 209 MB, 209715200 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 406 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1p1 ? 1920903 3742348 918008208 4f QNX4.x 3rd part
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(335, 10, 2) logical=(1920902, 2, 53)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(327, 84, 13) logical=(3742347, 0, 34)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdd1p2 ? 1902628 2442744 272218546+ 73 Unknown
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(371, 114, 37) logical=(1902627, 0, 62)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(256, 101, 36) logical=(2442743, 3, 37)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdd1p3 ? 1804143 2344000 272087568 2b Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(364, 116, 50) logical=(1804142, 12, 24)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(372, 65, 44) logical=(2343999, 0, 59)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdd1p4 ? 2821949 2822004 27487 61 SpeedStor
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(372, 101, 51) logical=(2821948, 15, 26)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(269, 114, 52) logical=(2822003, 7, 63)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Note: This is after installing windows 7.