Missing Operating system ASUS K601 laptop

mikee

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I am trying to fix a laptop for my dad's friend It's an ASUS K601. When I boot up it says "Missing Operating system. I know there is an OS on the drive because I took it out and backed her files up onto my computer. The boot order in the bios is 1 cd rom 2 removable device 3 hard drive 4 network. The thing is when I try and put the windows disc it still does the same thing I also tried a windows boot usb and linux boot usb it all doesn't matter it still says missing operating system. I know the usb drives boot and the windows dvd work in other computers. I tried as other forums suggested and made sure nothing was inserted into any removable drive that the computer may try to boot from but it still says that same message.
 
It's possible that the bootloader got screwed up.

But that shouldn't matter if you're trying to boot off of a disc or bootable flash drive (unless you didn't create the install discs correctly).
 
I tested both the bootable windows 7 flash drive and cd in another laptop they work flawlessly.

I just think it's weird that I can have the bios set to boot removable media and cd before hard drive and the boot sequence seems to just ignore them and try to boot to the corrupted hdd
 
Have you tried just manually selecting the boot device from the Boot Selection menu rather than changing boot order? That's usually what I do so I don't have to worry about messing with boot orders.
 
Omg thank you that actually worked I reinstalled windows but part way through the setup it asked for the product key so i turned the laptop over and lo and behold the sticker is totally deteriorated and unreadable so I have 30 days to figure that mess out well technically more like a week as this person I assume wants their system back before 30 days. I will do a reboot after windows update finishes to see if the missing operating system message went away. I also left the recovery partition intact in case I can't do anything with getting the legit key for this computer.
 
Omg thank you that actually worked I reinstalled windows but part way through the setup it asked for the product key so i turned the laptop over and lo and behold the sticker is totally deteriorated and unreadable so I have 30 days to figure that mess out well technically more like a week as this person I assume wants their system back before 30 days. I will do a reboot after windows update finishes to see if the missing operating system message went away. I also left the recovery partition intact in case I can't do anything with getting the legit key for this computer.

Have had that happen to me. That's why I ALWAYS check to see if that sticker is readable still or not. If it's not, before I reformat the system or do anything to it, I use MagicJellyBean Keyfinder to get the Windows key.

Did you reformat the drive completely already?
 
yep. Well there still is the factory recovery partition still in tact. I just don't know how to use it.

Windows was unbootable on the hard drive anyway so it wouldn't make a difference.
 
Windows was unbootable on the hard drive anyway so it wouldn't make a difference.

MJB lets you read the registry hive of a separate HDD, so even if it was unbootable, you could have hooked it up to another computer and extracted the key.
 
You can check the support web site at Asus and see if they have the oem recovery disks available, If the coa sticker is illegible then there's little hope of getting that key, the recovery disks will auto-install the license for you and you'll then have something to get a key from. Where your at right now, is not good for a key recovery
 
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