Missing operating system

You could try with win7 DVD to boot your machine and after boot restore your system to earlier restore point and check
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/668-system-recovery-options.html

Mahesh

Now just to find my wind 7 cd... Guess that is next!, but it isn't even getting to windows it goes from bios to mission OS

Since you have set the bios to defaults this may have changed the reading of the harddrive. Check the drive settings and if you see something like a raid settings change it to AHCI. Save then restart your computer. If you have another computer that this harddrive is booting to, check the bios settings for the drive and match the bios settings on this computer.

I didn't not try to boot in other machine as all the drivers will want to be updates.  I will check raid...it shouldn't be set!  There has only ever been one drive in this machine!

You need to boot machine with Win7 Disk, go to repair my computer and there you will find system restore option

But 1st you need to check if your HDD is visible in BIOS and your boot order must be set to DVD drive 1st
If your machine BIOS can't locate HDD, then you can't do anything

Mahesh

just dawned on my that I can create a windows restore disk from working machine and that should let me work with restore points and boot.ini...
thanks for the idea...let us see if it works!

restore point one didn't work...

Try to restore at some earlier date before you attached display card

Have you check the settings in the bios, often the default settings will not let you boot up to your harddrive if the settings are not correct. Did you set it to AHCI? Or what is the drive set to? If it is set to auto detect, you still may need to change it to AHCI, depending what setting the operating system was installed on.

I have set it to AHCI and am still not able to get any of the restore points to work.  With how quickly the "missing operating system" error shows up, The more I look, the more I think this is BIOS, After switching to ACHI it says it isn't finding the drives in the bios, but yet I can still find them under boot selections...

Ok, I did the chkdsk with switches..it went way too qucikly.  I changed to c: drive, didn't do that before because I didn't want to get stuck and the directory is empty.  I noticed that they recovery software always shows the drive as d: so I changed to D; and everything is there.  A few MS articles said that was normal and would befixed with tools.  I guess the going to try fixmbr if I don't hear back from you soon.

THANKS

fixmbr is not showing up as a valid command or parameter...I have tried if form x: d: and c: in all possible formats.

try the boot corrector tool from the paragon rescue kit :
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/rk-express/

try running the other two commands /fixboot and /rebuildbcd

After days of messing around, finally was able get things back up.  Thaynks for including link,  that had missing part

I am glad I was able to help, maybe I should have just given you the link in the first place instead of writing..... where I missed an important piece you needed.

Nah...you got me thinking.  I am not one to just follow links.  I used to live in DOS and only use Windows when I had to and did almost all my file/disk/system management in DOS.  I wrote some amazing autoexec.bat s in my day  and trimmed a ton of crap out of Bill's *.ini files.  I remember thinking I had unlocked the universe when I could make something a tsr sand load it between 640 and 1mb hold that was left for a few years....Little did I think that i would be using the same tools 25 years later to fix a 1tb drive and windows would still be bloated!

what solution did you use then?