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wellesleydpw

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Operating System Not Found

ViewSonic TPCV1250S Tablet running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition with Phoenix BIOS

On booting up, I get the message "Operating System not Found".
The BIOS has the Hard Drive listed.
No visible damage to the Hard Drive pins.

Ideas?
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arichakra
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Just recheck the bootorder at BIOS once.
Power down the system for around 1 hour & restart.
If no luck yet - just change the HDD.
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As arichakra mentioned, the BIOS may need to be adjusted.  Personally, I would start by resetting the BIOS to defaults and then checking the boot order.  If you or someone else has been in there, there may have been an inadvertant change made.

I know that most tablets don't have an optical drive, so that may complicate diagnostics a little.  If you have an external optical drive, consider running chkdsk from an install CD.  If not you may need to use a bootable memory stick with utilities for hard drive diagnostics and repair.
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turnbulld

The BIOS suggestions above are the lowest hanging fruit and the most likely to resolve your issue.  

If not though, you should also look at the disk partition table to see which partition is active.  Typically, partition 0 (or 1 whichever is the lowest number shown) should be active.   Use either fdisk.com or diskpart.exe to see the partition table and modify it to set the correct partition active.  There's no way to tell which partition should be active but it should not be a logical or extended partition.  Trial and error working through the primary partitions is probably the only way to check to see if this is the problem.

Also, this can happen if the master boot record becomes corrupt.  I don't know tablet Windows so you may have to research the commands but there is a tool called fixmbr.exe or bootrec.exe /fixmbr (depends on the Winders version) that can set a new usable master boot record on the boot disk.

Of course, all of this requires that you boot to the recovery shell from  either a firmware partition or from a DVD with a Winders disk.
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Mohammed Rahman
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Boot your laptop with Windows setup CD and choose recovery console.

You will be prompted 2 things:
- Windows installation to log on to
- Administrator password

After you log on, type "FIXBOOT C:" command. That is if your Windows are installed on C drive.
Type "exit" and reboot as usual.

If this doesn't help you, try "FIXMBR" instead. (same procedure above, except "FIXBOOT C:" part)

If that fails too, you will need to reinstall Windows.
Overall these are good directions to go. I do have a couple of comments.
arichakra: Why an hour? please explain. heat issues???

Another option is plugging that HDD into another PC as spare and looking at it. This will tell you if the HDD is even working., if there is a physical issue like bad sectors, etc.

I'd say the "Low hanging fruit" is HDD failure. That's why I recommend doing the above _first_!

Just my binary coin!
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Reseated the hard drive multiple times with no change.  Thendid it again and it booted up - Thanks!