My older laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6700. For about the last year, I've been almost afraid to turn it off. Often, it won't restart without crossed fingers and many tries.

The most often response I see is "Operating System Not Found". At this point the motor is running full blast. I can press the OFF button and sometimes it comes back like nothing happened, and sometimes I go through a process of taking out the battery, letting it cool, and trying again.

It works fine when it's working! McAfee is installed and scans when it stays on long enough (this laptop is rarely used [maybe for 30 minutes every few days], but has never caught a bug). SpyBot hasn't caught anything in over a year.

Any ideas what might be wrong?

Usually when it says that , it means something in the operating system is getting scrambled.
Do you have the recovery or an install disk?

If there is anything important on the hard drive , it would be good to copy the files to a flash drive , CD, DVD or some other storage device before or if a total failure happens.

Then if you have recovery disk or installation cd you could do a complete fresh install.

If the hard drive is making extra squeaks, squeals or odd noises then it might be the hard drive getting ready to fail.

Oh,
is the hard rive nearly full?
that can cause problems , if you can clean out/remove unused programs /files it may help the issue.

Thank you, Jo*Mar! I will check the capacity level.

It makes a grunt sound once while starting up, but no unusual noises otherwise. Just the motor running on high speed sometimes.

every computer has a small battery the size of a coin in it to hold the hardrive info etc booting sequence

id say they are easier to change if its a desktop

a store would charge you maybe 25 dollars

or buy a battery at rite aid or target or someplace

make sure its the same battery with same number on it

I had time to look for information -

hp laptop says operating system not found- lots of HP info links here -
http://www.google.com/search?q=Opera...w=1360&bih=669


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321626

http://www.wondershare.com/fix-compu...not-found.html

Frequently this can be the controller for the harddrive taking a dump. Another very likely culprit is the heads in your hard drive are not lining up correctly. In the case of the controller it is a small card on your hard drive and at boot up talks to your proccessor and tells it all the important information.

It is not unusual for things to get alittle scrambled and some of that info to get thru but not enough for the system to work. In the case of the heads not lining up think of the old vinyl records and a needle. Same principle but much more precise. If the head does not line up with track 00 and sector 0 you have the same results. PC knows there is a harddrive there just can not talk to it.

Get a mac you will be happier in the long run. Yes they can run windows now.

Appreciate all this info!

It's not a capacity problem - lots of free space.

I'm so nervous to try this HDD self test that Jo*Mar's 1st link suggests. Here's a portion: "It would seem there is a problem with the hard drive. You should go into the BIOS...tap F10 as you boot up and find the hdd self-test and run it and see if it comes back with errors." My excuse for putting it off is that the computer works fine. It's starting up that's the problem. Suppose I restart it and click to run the test and it's one of the times that the computer would've start up with no problem? (I'm asking myself this)

I'm such a wuss.

There is a great myth that computers need to be shut down. Sure, every now and then is totally fine, but think of it from the other side. The Internet is up 24\7\365, every website on the planet resides on a computer (server) and those computers run 99.99% of any given day.

So, when a customer of mine says, "Well, I shut it down after every time I use it"...I mention the above to them and then tell them that the computer that I use for file storage has been "ON" since 2001 they are shocked.

Moral of the story: If it runs fine but has trouble starting up, DONT shut it off!!

ANYWAY, check the CMOS battery like mentioned above, make sure there are NO other CD's, flash drives, micro cards, etc plugged in and I say do the test....I love to gamble.

I have my desktop on all day but shut it off at night, mainly to not have something on when it isn't being used.

I don't like leaving a laptop on for that many hours, just in case.

I guess it depends on how much it bothers you, if you don't want to mess with it until it gets worse or not.
But I would copy off any important files to a flash drive or cd. Just in case it totally fails at some point.