Is it dead?

[Tom7227]

A IBM Thinkpad my mother in law uses to play a card game won't fire up. It indicates "Operating system not found" which I suspect is not a good thing. Is this the result of some grandkid screwing around or something like a failure of the hard drive? I have heard about things like formating the hard drive and my be able to figure it out but I doubt like heck that there's a recovery disc around here that's going to work.

Thanks for your time.

Tom

[Lowblazah]

It can be either of the causes you mentioned...crashed Operating system but typically this is a common result of a bad harddrive.

What Model Thinkpad? I may have a Recovery CD you can try as we are an IBM Partner and do alot with Thinkpads. PM me the details.

[upnorth]

Most cases it is an issue with the drive. But if you can access the recovery drive(may need to go to IBM site to find out how) you can run tests and format and re install. I could be that there was just an issue with finding the boot area on the disk.

[Nick Kuhn]

Sounds like a HD issue. A bad motherboard won't boot at all, it'll be a black screen and you probably won't even hear the fans fire up. Sometimes the cables inside get fatigued and there's a bad connection from board to drive, those are a simple fix. Otherwise you have HD issues.

[Whoaru99]

Some computers have diagnostic routines built into the BIOS so if you get in there check for something like that. Otherwise, you can usually download some testing/diagnostic software for free and boot from that to test the systems.

Also, many mfg sell the restore disks. I've purchased a few over the years to fix computers where the disks weren't available. Generally, the restore disks were around $25.

Another option would be to try running Ubuntu from a CD (free download too). Don't do an install, just run it from the CD. Might be good enough just to do that (I'd guess you could find games for it, if not included) or would facilitate some diagnostics perhaps of the HDD.

[Whoaru99]

Did you ever get something worked out?

I checked Ubuntu run from disk option and it does have some games with the base install, including a solitare game.

[pureinsanity]

Hard drive is toast.

[Whoaru99]

Might still run just from a Ubuntu CD...

[Lowblazah]

Might still run just from a Ubuntu CD...

this is for his mother in law remember...not for him.