[SOLVED] Operating System not found

[Person98]

MY friend gave me his laptop to fix, it had an error "operating system not found" which appears directly after it passes the press f2 to enter bios screen. Since he didn't have his Windows CD i decided to install ubuntu (i am a user). The install went fine, it formated and installed without error (so i know the hard drive works), however when i rebooted off the install, it gave me the same error "operating system not found" The odd thing is that the bios can see the harddrive, the live cd can read and write the hard drive, I was thinking that possibly the master boot record might be corrupt but i would have though installing ubuntu would have fixed that. Any ideas on what i should do next? i could try updating the bios if you think that might help but it seems like it would be a pain to do

[Phreaker]

It's probably the mbr.
If the hdd has more than one partition ,check which one is bootable and active

[melojo]

from the live cd type sudo fdisk -l from a console and post the output.
This show your partitions

[Person98]

hi thanks for the advice the fdisk shows:

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255heads,63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280
Disk identifier: 0x881e3473

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 7112 57127108+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 7113 7296 1477980 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 7113 7296 1477948+ 82 Linux Swap / Solaris


any thoughts?

[melojo]

have a look here
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

[Person98]

i tried both of the "quickstart" and "Overwriting the Windows bootloader" sections and neither worked i still get the same error, I was looking in the BIOS in the boot priority, and noticed there is an ! in front of the the harddrive, do you perchance know what that means?

[Person98]

nevermind apperently that means the hard drive is disabled therefore it is fixed huzzah, thanks for the help