I woke up this morning to a crashed computer. Tried to reboot and got a message which stated "Operating system not found". That's not what you want to see first thing in the morning. No matter what I did, that's all I got, and my Norton rescue disk refused to work. Good ol' Compaq didn't supply me with a Win 98 install disk, preferring for some assenine reason these 2 "Full Restore" disks which contains everything. Unfortunately they don't work right, at least according to the extremely limited directions, and I had to go through this whole ridiculous process over and over again. I just finally got Win 98 reinstalled, but I have lost everything, and I DO mean everything. :( Everything on my C drive, and everything on my D drive. Of course, I do have backups of most of my important stuff, but it's probably going to take me a week or more to track it all down and reinstall. I can't receive or answer email yet, because I'm waiting on the phone (for over an hour now) for someone, anyone!, from AT&T Broadband to answer, to tell me the info I need in order to set my Eudora mail up again. And today is the first day of the Vue contest no less....... Please bear with me.......

:( Man, our sympathies are with you.

Mike, this is terrible... I mean, at least if all it was is windows, you could have brought it to a place where they would have copied your hard drive... But I guess it's your hard drive that went?? Anyway, this is the definitely the worse thing that could happen to somebody who uses the computer constantly, and believe me, we feel your pain..

Sorry to hear that. I went through something similar at work a couple of weeks ago. If you need any help with the contest, just ask.

Awww Mike... that is like, totally unfair to hard working forum moderators. I know only too well the frustrations of a total melt-down. Hugs your way... if you need any or all of us to help, you know all you have to do is yell. I can hear ya way up here don't ya know...

Mike, before your you do anything, try this....open your computer up, make sure you are grounded, touch something metal before you go in, unplug your hard drive, wait 5 minutes, then plug it in again, and try to fire it up. This is a trick we learned in school when the computer isn't broke just pissed off. Sharen:)

Gee Mike...I feel for ya :(. This very same thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I know how heartbreaking it is. Try what Sharen said. It's worth a shot and hopefully your computer is just "pissed off". And damn computer manufacturers and their "restore disks"! I KNEW there was a reason I build my own! I had a Compaq once and it was the 1st and only prebuilt computer I've ever had besides a Mac. We'd put the restore disk in to get it booted up, and then quickly did a format and clean install with a Windows 95 disk. Who needs all that extra junk!! Chin-up guy :( Laurie

I guess it is too late for Mike to try that Sharen, but I agree. I had the same scary experience when my machine would not start or produce 'no operating system' and be fine after checking cables inside or rebooting a couple of times.

Mike also, sometimes the Autoexec.bat gets messed up, you may just need to create a fake one so that you operating system will recognize that it is wrong and it will automatically fix the old one. Don't panic, I am sure this is an easy fix, unless something really weird happened lastnight when you shut down. Compac really should be able to help get you back up. Did anything weird happen? Have you tried to reboot to safe mode? Sharen

Oh, Mike I guess it is too late, I just reread your letter....I am so sorry....get a big pot of coffee, I am sure you will be up and running really soon. Write if you need any help......this is what I do at my other job, fix broken computers. Sharen:)

Happened to me before...."no operating system". Hey Mike...check your power and "C" drive connector in your PC box...they do get loose due to 'vibration'(from whirl and twirl of CDROM and Harddisk spin)...this is base on true incident. So what do you do to make sure!?..put the connects out and just plug them in snuggly again. Give it a try.

Hmmm...reinstall email Eudora...am I too late? Anyway...next time and sorry to hear what happened.

One major thing to do is to make sure that your C drive has only the OS on it. If it goes South, you can reformat and reinstall the OS and life will be good (or not as bad.) Every computer I get, the first thing I do is partition the pup and reinstall the OS. This works even for store bought machines. You may need to reinstall programs to register with the OS, but the data is fine.

Oh, if I wasn't clear, put a minimum of 2 partitions on the system - 1 for the OS, 1 for everything else. If you need more info on how to do this, just let me know. My condolences on your data loss ...

sorry Cresent...I don't think you can do that on a proprietary system like a Compaq. The restore disk looks to those drives to do what it needs to do...there is a very small partition that needs to be there for the restore disk. I used to have one. If you can only use the restore disk for a format (in other words, you don't have a Windows 9x disk), than you can't touch it. :( Laurie

Mike: Before going thru days of finding and putting everything back on the same hard drive, you might want to consider replacing it. If it's old--or even not so old--it might be on its way out. Then you'd be doing all this only to have it die on you again. Yes, sometimes when this happens it's only a fluke--loose cable or the like. But it also can be a sign your drive or controller is dying. A good replair joint will take your old drive and put all the data on a new one if you buy it from them. And new, good hard drives don't cost nearly as much as they used to. I'd weigh the age of your current drive against the cost of a new one and factor in your willingness to go through this again. Best of luck and sorry to hear of your misfortune.

Argh. Compaqs, I've already seen this on those most stubborn PCs... this is a kind of quick and dirty FDISK it seems, and in my experience (I repair PC half of my time lately) any Norton products can only make things worse. I do not recommend Norton for multi partition btw... As other have said, if we can help... Herv

Hi Mike, Doing the restore might have solved the problem. You really don't have any idea why the problem occurred. It would be a real good idea to open the case and check all the connections now to eliminate that possibility. If you don't determine what caused the problem it might happen again. Also make sure the components aren't covered with dust that can cause major problems if the components are really dirty. If they are, get a can of compressed air and blow it out. You can also protect your system files by hiding them, that way they won't be deleted by accident. I've never owned a Compaq or a computer that uses a restore disk; restore disks in my opinion are total BS. You might call Compaq and ask if you can install a "full" OS preferably NT4 or 2000 (if your not a gamer, most games work fine in win2000 however), if so you would be much better off buying a full version of NT4 or Win 2000 they are both rock solid. In all the years that I've been using NT and 2000 in my workstations I've never had a system lock up or crash. If you can't afford to buy it from a store, go to a computer show, I saw copies of NT4 at the one and only computer show I went too for $40.00. I've never bought anything from a computer show but it might be worth checking out. I build my own systems and have never had anything like that happen. You really need to try to find out why it happened; you may have a hard drive or motherboard etc. starting to fail. Or it might be something simple like dust. Best of Luck, Mike

Thanks all, for the words of encouragement and advice. :) I think I just might open this thing up and check it over. It's less than 2 years old though....... This happened once before...right after I installed Windows Media Player 7. Late last night I did it again, figuring it ought to be stable by now. I guess not, or at least, I guess there's something about MY PC that it doesn't like. Anyhow, I'm reinstalling software, and trying to locate all the stuff I've been putting on CD. For as much as I had backed up, I can't believe how much I didn't have backed up, which unfortunately is almost all of the models I've downloaded and built, except for the stuff I paid for, like Zygote/DAZ characters for Poser. But everything else is gone. All the cool models I found over this past year. :( Oh well... I'll get over it. Thanks again, everyone. :)

I'm sorry sweetie :(. I literally cried when my big hard drive failed the time before last. I lost tons of artwork. It is awful heartbreaking :(. Laurie

Mike, That happened to me before too. To prevent losing anything else in the future, I installed two hard drives and now ALL data goes to the second hard drive - the one without the operating system. The periodically I burn it to CD. Now when the computer goes a tad haywire and doesn't want to boot I just reformat and I know that all of my data is safe. Normally I would suggest partitioning your hard drive and have your data on the D: drive - but since you have those "crappy restore disks" it probably wouldn't work anyway. A second drive, that's the way to go! Good Luck! I know how you feel!!

And it even gets worse..... Vue is causing severe Windows crashes when I try to reinstall my veggies I bought. I don't mean only VUE is crashing, but the whole OS. Every time I get to the Bonny Clump, whether I enter the serial number or not, everything stops responding, and after a few minutes, I get the ol' "Blue Screen of Death". And, I can't load any vegetations at all, because the second I hit the icon, I get asked for the Bonny #. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing, and even clearing the folder afterwards, and it still keeps happening. Something MSUT be going into the registry about the damn Bonny Clump, but what? Where? How do I get rid of it, and why would it cause such hard crashes anyway? I just wrote a long email to Steve Bell about it, so hopefully he'll have an answer coming. As it is right now, I can't even use Vue. :(

Hey Mike, As you know I was where u are a few months ago. I havent fully recovered, and some of my work is permanently gone. If you need anything at all (I think I still have a lot of your freebies and stuff)....please let me know. hugs ~beck

:( That's so sad for you. I really hope you can get Vue working soon, and that everything works out. I have been lucky till now, and never lost everything. But I can imagine how I would feel if I would be in your shoes. So I'm sending some cyberhugs your way, although they probably don't help much.

Well thank you, Beck and Rynn! :) Anyhow, I woke up this morning and I suddenly remembered two very important things: 1) I have a CD full of Vue 3.1 scenes, many of which contained alot of my models I made, as well as materials and atmospheres. Of course, I still lost my .3DS versions of those models, but I can still use them in Vue at least. :) 2) The first things I did after getting 'doze reinstalled yesterday were to reinstall Zone Alarm and Mc Affee Virus Scan. So I suddenly remembered that I had had Mc Affee set to NOT check "unobtrusively" (as they say!) for viruses in the background in my previous installation. I checked, and sure enough, in my haste yesterday, I had that enabled. I guess those veggie files look like viruses or something, but sure enough, disabling the "background" virus scanning solved everything, and now all my plants are registered and working. :) So naturally the next thing I wondered is would my fresh re-install of Vue 4 and Poser 4 have made the .BUM import any different? Sadly, no. I still can't import .BUM files. Oh well... I guess after rushing and slaving over this PC all day yesterday (about 19 hours of tweaking, re-installing stuff and searching through CD's, by the time I called it a day), I guess I was too mentally drained to think clearly anymore. Things are looking much better today so far. :)

Oooo! Congratulations on a fine Bonny! :D

Sorry to hear about the crash Mike, it totally stinks! Good luck getting everything up and running... we'll miss ya. Let us know if we can help you out! -Brian

Heartfelt sympathies. My wife's laptop has just gone do-lalley. If everything is working again I suggest doing a few things 1. Running scandisk in thorough mode to check for bad disk sectors. If any are found, start saving for a new hard disk. 2. Put your newly created Windows 98 rescue disks somewhere safe. Creating them should have been an option when reinstalling the OS. If you didn't do it this time, do it next time. 3. I agree with Laurie: build your own PC's. It really pays off. After all, didn't artists make their own brushes once upon a time? If there's any help you need, let us know. Mark

Im sorry Mike, I had this happen a few months ago also and I know what your going through. Hope you get things completely back to normal as quickly as possible.

Yeah, it's coming along well, more or less. The thing that I'm most relieved about though is that at least I haven't lost a single thing I've purchased over the 'net. I have all my serial numbers for all those little downloadable apps such as Plant Studio and Eudora Mail written down in a notebook, or printed on paper, and I have all the .EXE files on CD's. The woerst part is I lost the stuff I myself made, but I can make some more, I guess. :) It seems really strange to be downloading my own stuff from the Vue Free Stuff though, along with my own pictures. Now I'm glad I didn't compress them too much. ;)