My Nephew's Laptop

[Philip Ayres]

Another family Laptop has come my way with a fault....

The error message I'm getting is

"Boot Device Not Found

Please install an Operating System on your Hard Disk"

Apparently it's a win10 laptop which my nephew downloaded a Steam game onto, didn't like it so deleted it. So plenty of scope for damage there depending on precisely what he did.

I'm told this is a repeat of a previous incident where the same thing produced the same result but was fixed by the shop as the laptop was still under guarentee.

I've checked the bios and it does appear to be booting off the HDD and can see how to switch it to boot externally.

Is there anything I can do to check the contents of the HDD? Booting off a USB device perhaps?

Is this a common fault with removing Steam games?

[The Doctor]

Try switching it on and off!

-Ralph

[Philip Ayres]

I have done.

The consensus is the clicking sound I hear when the machine tries to start - which I mentioned on FB and elsewhere - is the drive arm and the HDD is cream crackered

[The Doctor]

Press...F5! F5!

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

I would say pop the drive out and connect it to another computer to see if you can read the data, but last time I tried that I discovered since Windows, what? 7? 8? Harddiscs are protected so you can't do that.

Which was bloody annoying at the time.