Help - lost operating system during recovery

i have a compaq presario and was using the recovery disc to restore my system to the factory settings. It froze during the process and won't finish. when i get out of it by using ctrl/alt/del i get a message that i don't have an operating system. What can i do?

Start the restore process over again,

CAll Compaq

Fdisk the hard drive, then reformat it then start restore process
S-

not sure what this means - "Fdisk the hard drive, then reformat it then start restore process" please explain. thanks

Call Your Compaq support

FDisk is a dos command that allows you to delete the partitions on your hard drive and then recreate them. Reformating the hard drive is making the COmputer HD ready to have an OS installed on it.

Typically the Windows install and the compaq restore does do this but not always as well as it should

S-

Yup - reformat the HD. I have same LP and I had same problem. All you do is reformat your HD and re-install everything - meaning there is no recovery - you do fresh install and find all your drivers - if you are under warranty - call compaq tech support.

you can try and recover everything on the hard drive also ..... happen to me a couple of times (loosing the OS)

if you have access to a second computer just plug in your hard drive in it (provided you can open them both ... ) and install something like
"GetDataBack" or "Tiramitsu Recovery (i think)", but GetDataBack has done it for me, and it comes in for FAT or NTFS file systems.

the important thing is not to run the software from the hard drive you are recovering from.

PM me if you need more details on that.

thank you all for your help! i called compaq last night and they are sending me some recovery cd's and i am creating a windows start up disc that should take care of it.