Found a hard disk but can't find a boot sector on it to boot it

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[ The PC Guide | Troubleshooting and Repair Guide | The Troubleshooting Expert | Troubleshooting The System Overall | Troubleshooting Boot-Time Error Messages ]

Found a hard disk but can't find a boot sector on it to boot it

Explanation: The system found a hard disk to try to boot, but couldn't load the operating system from it because it could not find a boot sector on it.

Diagnosis: The most common cause of this problem is trying to boot a new hard disk before partitioning and formatting it. Getting this message on an existing system means that there is likely corruption of some sort in the key disk structures.

Recommendation:

Until the hard disk is set up, boot from a floppy disk instead of the hard disk to start the system.
For a new hard disk, remember to partition and format the hard disk.
If this type of error is encountered in an existing system, there is a good chance that the disk has become corrupted somehow. Troubleshoot this here.

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