Operating System not detected !!

This covers a couple areas of the oc-forums, but I figured I'd post it here in this one

So I opened my case to add a stick of ram, replugged in everything and booted her up and nothing happened.

I took out the new ram and it started up fine, but now it doesn't recognize the hard drive.!

I rechecked all the plugs, cords, ,etc., and all was good (the same as it was before) and nothing has changed frrom the original setup.

Reboot and the bios recognizes the HD, but comes back with "Operating System not detected"

So I'm at a loss right now...Everything was fine before, and is back to how it was, with no changes. And now the motherboard detects the HD (primary master wit nothing else on the cable) part of the time, and the OS none of the time..

HELP!!!

I had that problem last week. It was do to something else, but I fixed it by rebuilding the MBR.

Throw in what ever MS cd you have and load the repair console.

Then in the cmd line type "fixmbr"

Give that a shot.

thanks, I'll try it out

Failing that, use a Win98 bootdisk, wait for the command promt, and type "format /mbr" to delete the mbr (the system will build a new one when you reboot)

Those ideas both are grgeat, and I tried fdisk /mbr already
But it says "no fixed disk present" and my HD is not being detected.

Hmmm... That looks like a hardware (HDD controller) problem. Try to clear CMOS\reset to defaults - this helps sometimes.

Couldn't you fry something while stuffing that RAM stick? Did you ground yourself befor doing that?

yes, I grounded myself.

And it'll recognize the HDD now. And It'll boot from cdrom or Floppy. But not frrom the HDD. Tried fdisk, and it says "no fixed disk" I'll take out the drive and test it on another sytem tosee if it works there