What does it mean when my laptop says Operating System not found mean?

I have a dell inspiron and when you turn it on you get oper. sytm.not found and you cant safe mod restore nothing.Can this be repaired or If I gat a cd like windows xp or whatever will it be able to boot it up.If you know of a way that I can fix this please let me know asap. desperate joe

What does it mean when my laptop says Operating System not found mean?chicago theater

This also hapens if you have a USB flash drive plugged in , I nearly reformatted my pc 1 night before I realised Ii'd left the flash drive in, removed it %26amp; everything started fine.

What does it mean when my laptop says Operating System not found mean?met opera opera theater

check that you have not got a cd in the drive. sometimes that is the cause of that message.

next, check the bios to see if it is detecting the drive.

next, if it is, you may have to do a repair on your installation - usually from a hidden partition on dells.

if the bios isnt seeing the drive, check whether the cable has popped out or the drive is out of its socket. dells do that sometimes. take the cover off the bottom to expose the harddrive and check the seating.

if it is none of these, your harddrive may be dead.

dell have a pretty good support desk to talk you through all this.

good luck
You need to reinstall Windows. Usually Dell sends system recovery disks with their computers. Try the windows restore disk.
By your information the problem found is that there is no Operating system in your laptop. Please install Operating System before using laptop.
Operating system not found is a serious problem, unless you have a diskette in a floppy drive and the PC is trying to boot to that, but you said it was a laptop so I doubt that is the problem. Laptops usually don't have built in floppy drives anymore.

This can be caused from hard drive failure, corruption of the master boot record (MBR) or corrupted system files in the operating system.

Yes you could and should try booting from the windows CD, but I would recommend you take it to a professional or risk file loss.